


rise like a phoenix in the desert winds

by TardisIsTheOnlyWayToTravel



Series: Like a Phoenix [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Star Wars Original Trilogy, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Anakin-Harry has so many regrets, Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Feels, Harry is not happy with the plight of the house elves like not at all, I'm going to break it worse before I fix it, Redemption, Reincarnation, ignores the force awakens, like seriously angst, the Mirror of Erised scene is always sad, this verse is probably endgame Harry/Ginny so you've been warned
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-22
Updated: 2016-12-01
Packaged: 2018-09-01 12:27:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 38,978
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8624473
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TardisIsTheOnlyWayToTravel/pseuds/TardisIsTheOnlyWayToTravel
Summary: The one where Anakin Skywalker wishes for a second chance as he lies dying, and is reborn as a boy named Harry Potter.





	1. Anakin Skywalker

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, so I've had this idea floating around in my head for literal years, and I wanted to try writing it. I'm not sure how long it's going to be or if I'll finish it, so you've been warned. I also don't know how much of Harry's Hogwarts years I'll actually cover. We'll see, I guess.
> 
> Also, this totally ignores The Force Awakens, so please do not ask me if TFA characters or situations will exist within this fic. They will not, no matter how awesome they are. This ignores everything but the prequels and the original trilogy, basically.
> 
> Finally, this borrows a bit from Fialleril's awesome Tatooine slave culture headcanons, although they're altered a little.

** Chapter One **   
** Anakin Skywalker **

The memories come back slowly, but steadily, and by the time he is ten years old, Harry Potter remembers everything of his previous life. Anakin Skywalker, Darth Vader, and everything between the two – he remembers all of it. It’s not an easy thing to remember, and sometimes the memories are more vivid than Harry would like... but he’d rather have the memories than not. Because however painful his memories are, in the end, losing them would mean forgetting Padme, and Luke – and his memories of them alone make remembering everything else worth it.

It’s a hard life he lives, especially for a child, but Harry considers it penance, for all the terrible things he did in his previous life.

The man he had become was neither good, nor kind; and although he did one last good, brave thing in saving his son’s life, that does not undo two decades’ worth of atrocities. Harry can’t forgive himself for those, any more than he can forgive himself for the death of his angel, something he still mourns as much as if it had occurred yesterday. Neither time nor death have been able take that grief from him: he loved Padme as he has loved no one else. He no longer knows if it was true that she had died at his hands, as Palpatine had said: but that he was unable to save her life, however her death had happened, is a truth he has to live with, always.

For all that he’s a child, Harry is older now, and wiser, and he knows better than anyone the trap that the Sith way of life represents. It gives the illusion of power, and nothing more; but the Jedi way, Harry thinks, was hardly any better. The denial of emotion – the one thing that had always given his life meaning – and its ‘ _we assist the Republic, not individuals’_ rhetoric was, frankly, stupid. Harry knows that his emotions are what give him strength, and while controlling them, channelling them into something useful is important, denying his feelings only leaves him lost an uncertain. As for the rhetoric the Jedi had spouted about serving the Republic and keeping an eye on the big picture... when the ‘big picture’ means ignoring people’s suffering, because stability is more important than the wellbeing of helpless people... well, something has gone drastically wrong, Harry is sure of that, now.

In the end, when he’d died, he’d left his previous reality with zero Sith in existence, and one Jedi who believed in faith and family rather than the purging of emotional ties... and it is, perhaps, a good thing that the old ways of the Sith and the Jedi were lost. They had failed, just as the old Republic and the Empire had failed... leaving people like Anakin’s son to build something new, something which, just maybe, has a better chance of working.

Harry holds onto that thought, sometimes, when he despairs at all the evils he committed. In the end... life in his home reality will go on.

In the meantime, Harry’s life in this one continues. It has taken years for all his memories to return, but return they have, leaving him more Anakin than the boy he’d been reborn as. He still answers to the name Harry Potter, of course, but inside his head and his heart, half the time he still thinks of himself as _Anakin_.

Not that anyone but his teachers at school ever call him Harry, anyway. He has no friends, thanks to his cousin, and his relatives are a cruel parody of a family, at least where he is concerned. They starve him, and mistreat him, and force him to do all the housework; even making him cook breakfast in a pan which when he’d started cooking had been far too big for him to hold, and is still difficult for his tiny, malnourished body to handle.

But Harry sees his current life as penance: so he grits his teeth and does as he is told, resisting the lure of the little voice of his head that tells him that it would be _so easy_ to use his abilities with the Force to frighten and intimidate his relatives into doing his bidding. But that is the Sith way of doing things: and now that he is free of that way of life, Harry has no intention of ever going back to it. To be a Sith is to know hatred, and fear, and helpless despair; and Harry, for all that he is treated badly right now, knows that as long as he keeps his head down and doesn’t give in, one day he will be old enough to leave, and choose his own destiny. For his entire existence, his destiny has been chosen for him: first as a slave, then as a Jedi, then as a Sith. Anakin isn’t about to lose the one chance he has at a free future.

Besides, he has been a slave, twice over – once as a boy, then in servitude to Palpatine. He understood how to keep his head down, to defy his masters only in the little ways they would not notice, and to keep on fighting for his survival even when life wore him down and left him tired and miserable.

When he is eleven years old, a letter addressed to Mr H. Potter arrives. Staring down at the address – _The Cupboard Under the Stairs, 4 Privet Drive, Little Whinging, Surrey –_ the hairs on the back of his neck rising, Harry wonders how the sender _knows_ , and what they could possible want with him. 

Harry slips it into his pocket to read later, without telling his relatives: he knows them well enough to realise that they would take it from him, if they knew he had it. It’s not until hours later that his chores are all done, and Petunia sends him outside to ‘keep out of trouble.’

Harry walks to the local park, ignoring the evil eye the neighbours give him as he passes, and reads the letter. Mingled apprehension and curiosity is replaced with sheer surprise, and when he is done, Harry sits on the swing set, stunned.

He knows, of course, that many planets in his home reality held beliefs in magic. Anakin himself had been raised with them as a slave on Tatooine, praying to the gods for leniency from his master and escape from his bonds. Once he’d left Tatooine, of course, the Jedi had tried to drive such ‘primitive superstition’ out of him. According to them, the concept of magic was how ‘primitive’ peoples inaccurately conceived of the Force. For the Jedi, no mystical beliefs in anything but the Force were valid.

For a long time, Anakin had left his childhood belief system behind, to the point where Harry now had trouble remembering much of it. But he remembers that the desert is Mother to her children, those who are enslaved by the Hutts, and that her children can shelter against the desert sandstorms when their masters cannot. He remembers, too, the trickster god, who in a thousand different stories frees himself and the other slaves by fooling his master. 

Once Anakin had known the names of these gods, spoken in a secret tongue known only to the slaves. But it has been too long since he has last spoken the secret language to another: these days, Harry remembers only a handful of words. 

Palpatine had been just as contemptuous of beliefs in magic as the Jedi, if not even more so, and Anakin had deliberately not thought of his childhood belief system while under his master’s control: what his master did not know, he could not take from Anakin. Besides which, Anakin had been in a very different mental place, then: nothing had really mattered to him anymore, and he had distanced himself from the life he’d led before he was Vader; just as when he’d become a Jedi, he’d distanced himself from the life he’d previously led as a slave.

But now, Harry is neither Jedi nor Sith: and he is willing to look back at his childhood beliefs with a much more open mind. Sometimes he regrets the fact that he turned his back so thoroughly on where he’d come from, but there isn’t all that much Harry can do about it, now. In this reality, after all, Tatooine probably doesn’t even exist – or is so far away that no one on Earth even knows it exists.

Staring into the distance, Harry wonders what this ‘school of witchcraft and wizardry’ really is. A hoax? A school of misguided Force users? Or genuine _magic_ , of the kind spoken of in the old stories he’d listened to on Tatooine? 

A read of the enclosed book list has Harry discarding the ‘misguided Force users’ theory. The book and equipment list speaks of witches’ hats and books of spells and magic wands, the kinds of things Harry would expect to see in films or in children’s storybooks. The whole thing doesn’t sound like it can be real, and yet... Harry wonders.

Little does he know, this letter is only the first of many.

In the days that follow, more and more letters arrive, and Harry’s relatives deny him each and every one, unaware that Harry has already received one of the letters. Harry grows steadily angrier with each confiscated letter. He is certain by now that this is no hoax; Vernon and Petunia are too furious, too frightened, too _knowing_. Harry wonders if this has some connection to his mysterious parents, the ones that his aunt and uncle refuse to speak of.

With each passing day, the letters are delivered in increasingly ridiculous ways: Anakin’s favourite method of delivery is when he cracks open an egg while cooking breakfast, only for a rolled-up letter to fall into the pan. Anakin almost falls off his stool from laughing so hard (he isn’t yet tall enough to cook at the stove without standing on something) and Petunia threatens to box his ears if he doesn’t stop laughing this minute. But the whole thing is so absurd: a pair of grown adults thrown into rage and fear at the delivery of a bunch of letters, all delivered in an increasingly bizarre fashion.

In the end, Vernon loses it, and packs them all into the car and _drives_. He drives all day, without stopping for food or water, until they reach a gloomy-looking hotel. Here, Vernon declares, surely the letter-senders will not find them.

The next morning, delivered with breakfast, is a letter. _Mr H. Potter, Room 17, Railview Hotel, Cokeworth_ , the envelope says.

Vernon grows ever closer to losing his sanity altogether.

* * *

It’s in a shack on a rock in the sea that Harry learns of his birthright, of magic, and of his fame – all conveyed through a sordid little story of a Dark Lord on the rise, and rise, until he had come after Harry and his parents, and...

“You-Know-Who killed ‘em,” Hagrid says, and Harry feels dread bubble up inside him, as Hagrid goes on to add, “An’ then – an’ this is the real myst’ry of the thing –he tried to kill you, too. Wanted ter make a clean job of it, I suppose, or maybe he just liked killin’ by then. But he couldn’t do it. Never wondered how you got that mark on yer forehead? That was no ordinary cut. That’s what yeh get when a powerful, evil curse touches yeh – took care of yer mum an’ dad an’ yer house, even – but it didn’t work on you, an’ that’s why yer famous, Harry. No one ever lived after he decided ter kill ‘em, no one except you...”

Harry misses some of what Hagrid says next. He doesn’t understand why he’s alive when an entire world thinks that he should be dead, dead at the hands of a powerful Dark Lord... but he thinks of Anakin Skywalker’s dying wish – _I wish I could have a second chance, to make up for what I’ve done_ – and he thinks of _destiny_ , of a future foretold and a prophecy fulfilled in the greatest of irony – and he recognises the shape of the story he’s been told.

He thought that he was free of destiny at last. But Hagrid speaks of a Dark Lord mysteriously vanished, of a death curse, thwarted... and Harry knows, with the unerring instincts of a Force-user, that his destiny is far from over.

He asks Hagrid quiet questions, and when the Dursleys try to interrupt, speaking unkind words and implying far unkinder actions, Hagrid leaps into action, pointing the battered umbrella he carries at Dudley – 

And Harry throws out a hand, and Dudley is shoved sideways by an unseen force, a flash of violet light missing him by inches.

“Much as I understand the impulse, do not attack my relatives in front of me,” Harry says, and there is _command_ in his voice, for all that it has the pitch of an eleven year old boy. Hagrid falters at the look on Harry’s face, and says, “Right, yer right, of course... shouldn’ta lost me temper...”

Harry nods once, and turns to his relatives.

“I suggest you spend the night in the other room,” he says, and his voice is cold and still with that note of command. For once, it is Harry’s relatives who do as he says, not the other way around – shaken, perhaps, by Dudley’s brush with peril, and the realisation that when dealing with magic, their usual bluster and intimidation tactics will not prevail.

The next day Harry enters into a hidden world, of wonders and dangers, following in Hagrid’s wake as the giant of a man makes his way through crowds of strangely dressed people. But Anakin had seen far stranger in his lifetime, so Harry follows Hagrid through the throng without staring. He is curious, yes, but he knows better than to gawk like an Outer Rim nerf-herder visiting Coruscant for the first time. Instead he moves like he knows the place, and the people; no one gives him a second look amongst the crowd.

In the robe shop, a pale boy with a pointed face tries to speak to Harry, talking of what a crime it is that first-years aren’t allowed their own brooms at Hogwarts and speaking disparagingly of any house which isn’t Slytherin, whatever that means. Harry recalls twenty years of attending Imperial functions as Vader, forced to rub elbows with the privileged elite, who believed that wealth made them better than other people and that their every whim ought to be indulged. This boy puts Harry strongly in mind of the Imperial aristocracy, and Harry glares silently at him until he falls silent. Harry leaves the robe store without learning the other boy’s name, and hopes that Hogwarts isn’t full of others like him, who talk about magic like it’s something that only belongs to those who are born in this world.  

When Hagrid buys Harry an owl as a birthday present, Harry is touched by the simple kindness of this man, whom Harry knows has logged every word of abuse the Dursleys have hurled in Harry’s direction while in his presence, and noticed Harry’s ragged, oversizes hand-me-downs.

“Thank you,” Harry says quietly, and looks at the owl. She looks back at him with intelligent yellow eyes, as though assessing her new owner. Harry smiles, and they continue onwards to the wand shop.

There, Harry tries several dozen different wands before one responds appropriately to him with a shower of red and gold sparks.

“Curious... how very curious...” mutters the wand-maker, and Harry fixes his eyes on the man.

“What’s curious?” he asks, and the wand-maker looks at Harry with a pale-eyed stare.

“I remember every wand I’ve ever sold, Mr Potter. Every single wand. It so happens that the phoenix whose tail feather is in your wand, gave another feather – just one other. It is very curious indeed that you should be destined for this wand when its brother – why, its brother gave you that scar.”

Harry goes still.

“Yes, thirteen and a half inches. Yew. Curious indeed how these things happen. The wand chooses the wizard, remember... I think we must expect great things from you, Mr Potter... After all, He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named did great things – terrible, yes, but great.”

Harry thinks of another lifetime, in which he brought down the Jedi Order, secured the Imperial throne for his master, and enforced Palpatine’s rule over the galaxy with an iron fist. He doesn’t wonder why it is that he has been chosen by a wand that is brothers with the wand of a Dark Lord remembered as both terrible and great. 

He says nothing, and leaves the wand shop behind Hagrid, and hopes desperately that this isn’t a case of history repeating itself. After all, the wand chooses the wizard...

But Harry isn’t Vader anymore, he tells himself. That has to be enough.

The thought doesn’t comfort him at all, and he wonders how many others ways there are for him to fall.

* * *

When Harry is dropped off at King’s Cross station, he looks down at his ticket, which gives the platform as _platform nine and three quarters_ , then looks up again at the space between platform nine and ten, and frowns. 

Harry is fairly certain there’s some kind of trick to this – not the nasty kind, but the kind designed to keep the hidden world of witches and wizards from prying eyes. He waits around not far from the barrier between platforms nine and ten, and observes those around him. 

Presently, a family of red-heads approachs – a family of red-heads with an _owl._ It’s a different species from Harry’s own, but an owl all the same. Harry walks towards them.

“Packed with muggles, of course,” the woman – the children’s mother, presumably – says as Harry grows nearer, confirming Harry’s suspicion that he is looking at a family of witches and wizards.

He clears his throat.

“Excuse me,” he says, with the kind of grin that he used to give reporters during the Clone Wars, the one that always had them unbending enough to smile back, and perhaps go a little easier on him than they would have otherwise. Harry has never understood why _he_ was always the one who had to deal with the press – somehow, Obi-Wan had always managed to weasel his way out of that particular duty, even when it was his death-defying stunt that had saved the day during battle.

Suppressing a pang of pain and fury at the reminder of his former friend, Harry can’t help but think, given his fame this time around, that it is just as well that he has some idea how to deal with reporters and star-struck individuals. A genuine eleven year old boy with no training in that sort of thing, he suspects, would be in some trouble.

The woman in front of Harry looks down at him in surprise, and Harry pushes that thought away, and says, “I’m sorry, but do you know the way to platform nine and three quarters? I live with muggles, and no one explained to me how to find the train.” Harry lets his grin turn rueful.

Before the woman can speak, the smallest red-head – a girl even smaller than Harry – pipes up.

“No one told you?” she says, and her voice is full a quiet dignity and authority that seems out-of-place in a girl her age. “Don’t worry, it’s easy enough. See the barrier between platforms nine and ten? I know it looks solid, but it’s not – you’re supposed to walk through it.”

Harry stares at her, because there’s something about the girl’s brown eyes that is awfully familiar. It takes him a moment to realise it, but the girl’s eyes are the same colour and shape as Padme’s – and now that he’s seen that, other little things remind him of Padme as well, from the way she holds herself to the smile lurking at the edges of her serious expression.

Something of his feelings must show on his face, because the girl looks suddenly worried, and puts a hand on his arm.

“Are you all right?”

“Fine.” Harry tries to smile, but grimaces instead. “Sorry. It’s just... you look like someone I used to know.” He changes the subject. “What’s your name?”

“Ginny,” she says, still looking at him with concern. “Ginny Weasley.”

“I’m Harry Potter,” says Harry, and one of Ginny’s brothers blurts out, “No _way!_ Can I see the scar?”

Ginny turns a scathing look on him, in the same moment as his mother says, “ _Ron!_ ” in a scolding tone of voice. 

“I’m sorry, that was insensitive of my brother,” Ginny says, turning back to Harry. “The last thing you want is to be reminded of...” She trails off, with an apologetic smile.

Harry just looks at her, and wonders at how much she reminds him of Padme. Her colouring is different, as is the shape of her face, but everything else...

“Don’t worry about it,” he says, after waiting a beat too long. He tries to smile a second time, and this time it works. “I should get used to it.”

“You shouldn’t have to,” says Ginny, frowning, and reminding him more of Padme than ever.

“It’s fine,” Harry says. “Thank you for telling me how to find the platform.”

“You can go through with Ron, if you like,” Ginny’s mother offers. “This is your first year, isn’t it? Ron’s in the same year as you.”

Ron appears to have been struck dumb in a mixture of embarrassment and awe, but he looks at Harry hopefully.

Harry isn’t sure that he wants to hang around with a fan, but reminds himself that the boy is merely a child, and that it won’t kill him to show a little kindness. Besides, it’s likely, from what Hagrid told him, that half of Hogwarts will be just as star-struck by his presence.

So Harry gives an easy smile, and says, “Sure.”

“You don’t have to,” says Ginny, giving her mother a look. Ron sends her a glare.

“I don’t mind, really,” Harry assures her, even though that’s not entirely true. But Ginny relaxes, and smiles.

“All right then. Good luck, Harry Potter. Have fun at school.”

It takes Harry a moment to stop staring at her, because that _smile_...

“Are you an angel?” he blurts out, without even thinking about it, and hears the two boys who look identical cackle loudly.

But the smile is wiped off Ginny’s face, replaced by a look of mingled shock and dread.

“ _What_ did you just say?” she asks, and her voice shakes, just a little.

“Nothing, never mind,” Harry says quickly, embarrassed at himself, something painful tugging at his heart. He turns to Ron. “Shall we?”

Ron nods, and seems to want to get away from his family just as much as Harry does. They head towards the barrier at a run – and several seconds later, find themselves standing on a platform that wasn’t there a moment ago. Harry blinks up at the bright red steam-powered train, which gives Ron’s family time to catch up with them. While Ron’s mother is reminding her youngest son of half a dozen different instructions and the eldest one is saying something about a prefect’s compartment while the twins yell something about a tarantula, Harry slips away. Just as he boards the train, he glances back, to see Ginny staring at him with a troubled look.

He enters the first carriage without another backwards glance, and tries not to feel haunted by his encounter with the girl. He takes a seat in the first empty compartment he finds, and rests his elbows on his knees, putting his face in his hands.

He doesn’t know why that girl reminds him so much of Padme. But Padme is gone, dead in another reality entirely. And it’s all his fault.

Harry lifts his head as Ron joins him about ten minutes later, shortly after the whistle blows and the train begins to move.

“Is it alright if I sit here?” Ron asks, expression tentative. Harry wants to say no, but gives a short nod.

Ron takes a seat, and looks at Harry curiously. 

They sit in silence, for a while; but then Ron begins to ask Harry questions, and Harry responds with questions of his own. They talk about the wizarding world, the muggle world, and everything in-between: but when Ron sends Harry a sideways glance, and asks, “So what was that with you and my sister...” Harry scowls and says, “Nothing.” Ron looks dubious, but doesn’t ask anything more about that particular topic, for which Harry is glad.

The blonde boy from the robe store stops by, insults Ron, and tells Harry that he doesn’t want to go making friends with the wrong sort. Harry isn’t sure exactly what ‘ _the wrong sort’_ means, but he can guess, based on Malfoy’s words back in the robe shop: ‘ _I really don’t think they should let the other sort in, do you?’_

When ‘ _the other sort’_ means ‘ _anyone with magic whose families aren’t magical’,_ Harry thinks, most emphatically, that they _should_. And he really doesn’t want anything to do with anyone who thinks otherwise.

He looks Malfoy straight in the eye and says evenly, “I think I can tell who the wrong sort are for myself, thanks.”

Malfoy flushes pink, and tells Harry that if he isn’t careful, he’ll go the same way as his parents.

Harry only smiles, and it is a terrible smile.

“Really, Malfoy?” he asks, leaning in, and despite his superior height Malfoy takes a step backwards. “You think so?” Harry’s terrible smile widens. “Given that I defeated a Dark Lord, you might want to reconsider making _threats_ in my presence.”

Malfoy might have been brought up to be an idiot dependent on his wealth and his name, but he isn’t _entirely_ stupid. Whatever common-sense he has asserts itself, and he mutters something before leaves the compartment, Crabbe and Goyle following behind him.

Harry sits back down on his seat, the terrible smile fading into something weary. Ron is staring at him, looking unnerved.

“It’s alright,” Harry tells him. “I don’t bite.”

Ron swallows.

“Has anyone ever told you can look pretty scary?”

Harry thinks of twenty years as the Empire’s bogeyman, a figure which made even seasoned officers pale in terror at his presence.

“Not usually to my face,” he says, “but I’m pretty sure they’ve said it behind my back.”

It takes a while for Ron to lose his unease, but eventually, he settles down again. He and Harry pass the journey companionably. 

Before they know it, they’re at Hogwarts.


	2. Hogwarts

** Chapter Two **  
** Hogwarts **

Harry waits in the Great Hall with all the other first year students as one by one, they’re all sorted into a Hogwarts house. Slytherin, Gryffindor, Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff; Ron told him all about them on the train. He may have been somewhat biased – against Slytherin, and very much for Gryffindor, which is the house into which his family has apparently been sorted for the last several generations – but Harry doesn’t doubt that there’s a kernel of truth in everything he said.

“Slytherin is full of dark wizards,” Ron had told him. “They say You-Know-Who himself was a Slytherin, and half the current students have Death-Eater parents. Whatever happens, you don’t want to be sorted _there_.”

Harry doubts that _everyone_ in Slytherin is a dark wizard, statistically speaking, but if what Ron says is at all true, he should probably avoid being sorted there.

Eventually, Professor McGonagall calls out, “Potter, Harry!” and the Great Hall fills with whispers and murmurs as Harry walks forward to sit on the stool and try on the battered old wizard’s hat.

“Leaping leprechauns!” says a little voice in Harry’s ear. Harry tenses. “Well, you’re not an average first year student, are you? The things in your head–”

“ _Stay out of my head_ ,” Harry hisses, and the hat makes a sound like someone clucking their tongue.

“I can’t do that, not until I’ve seen enough of you to sort you. But don’t worry, I’m bound not to share anything I see. You’ve more privacy than the confessional, here. So let’s get on with it, shall we?” 

There is a short pause before that Sorting Hat speaks again. 

“You know, you could be great in Slytherin,” it says, slow and thoughtful. “You have the potential.”

“I’ve known greatness, and it brought me no joy. Besides, I’d rather not have to kill someone in self-defense my first night at Hogwarts,” Harry adds dryly, because even from here, he’s seen the way that some of the Slytherins are looking at him, with black, unreasoning hatred for what he represents. If Harry Potter were to be sorted into their house, it might be too much for some of them.

Not that Harry wants to be in Slytherin. ‘ _Slytherin is full of dark wizards_ ,’ Ron had said, and Harry is doing his best to avoid falling to the Dark Side a second time. Spending too much time in the company of those who hold darkness as an ideal... has a tendency to corrupt even the brightest. And Harry has never been that. There is still hate, and darkness, and above all, _fear_ lurking in his heart. Harry does not necessarily believe that all emotions are the key to the Dark Side, any more, but... he is willing admit that an imbalance of _certain_ emotions may create an easier path to the Dark Side.

The Sorting Hat must see what’s in his mind, because it tuts, and says, “No, no, best to avoid Slytherin if you want to avoid that path. In another life, I might have said Hufflepuff for you, because once given your loyalty is unparalleled... but in this life, there’s no one who’s earned it yet, is there? No, I think you had best be GRYFFINDOR!”

The last word is bellowed into the Great Hall, and Professor McGonagall lifts that Sorting Hat off Harry’s head. He joins the Gryffindor table. Some time later, a relieved Ron slumps down into the seat next to Harry’s.

They have officially been sorted, the last step in becoming a student of Hogwarts. Harry will spend the next seven years here. 

He hopes it’s better than the Dursleys.

* * *

The next month passes in a blur. Harry gets used to people staring at him, following him down the hallways to get a better look at him, all the while exclaiming things like _‘look, it’s Harry Potter!’_ as though Harry isn’t right there, able to hear every word. He does his best to ignore it, going about his business as thought nothing out of the ordinary is happening.

But all kinds of out-of-the-ordinary things keep happening. The flying lesson is the most... _interesting_ of his new classes. Harry was always a fantastic pilot, but a broomstick is very different from a speeder, or a spaceship. As it turns out, however, he’s good in the air no matter what kind of vehicle he’s using, even when it’s as ludicrous as a broomstick. 

One of the other boys – Neville – loses control and falls off his broom from twenty feet in the air, and the class watches in astonishment as he gently floats to the ground. No one realises that Harry is slowing Neville’s descent with the Force. After that, though, people stop making loud and obnoxious comments about Neville’s lack of magical ability. Harry grins to himself, and doesn’t say a word.

Not long after the flying lesson, Malfoy tries to challenge Harry to a duel. Harry smiles, and says, “Are you sure you want to duel me, Malfoy?”

Even Malfoy’s bravado falters a little in the face of that smile. He mutters something and leaves without causing any further trouble. 

Harry reads all his textbooks, even the dull ones, and takes copious notes in class, and listens alertly to everything the professors say. Knowledge is power, he learned that lesson the hard way; every piece of knowledge that your opponent has that you do not is an advantage they have over you. Harry is a newcomer here, in a world where everyone knows his name and his story, and he is dangerously ignorant. Best to remedy that as soon as possible, he thinks darkly.

Harry soon discovers that he is remarkably good at magic. Perhaps it’s the fact that in some ways, he’s older and more mature than the other students, thanks to the memories he has of living another life; maybe it’s his skill in using the Force. Whatever the reason, Harry usually gets his spell right on the first try. Before long, as in every single class the rest of the students struggle to achieve what Harry did within the first five minutes of the lesson, Harry is _bored_.

There is one other student in his classes who does as well as Harry, a Gryffindor girl named Hermione Granger, who seems to take it as a personal affront that Harry is as good at schoolwork as she is. Whenever the teachers asks a question Granger's hand shoots into the air, and she waves it around, desperate to be the one chosen to answer. When she is, she shoots Harry a little superior look, as though she’s just won something. When Harry is called upon to answer instead, and gets the answer right – as he usually does – Granger glowers at him like he’s insulted her somehow. 

It’s bewildering, and a little amusing. Harry just wants to get on with things and learn what he needs to, but Granger clearly thinks that the two of them are in competition. Harry, to be honest, couldn’t care less about whether he does better than anyone else, as long as he’s doing well and learning the material. But Granger, obviously, doesn’t think that way. 

Once upon a time, Harry was like her – desperate to be the best at everything, to prove himself equal. He likes to think he’s grown up, since then.

Sometimes Granger tries to help the other students, but comes across as so bossy and condescending that they usually resent her attempts to assist them.

Harry isn’t surprised when Ron, the latest recipient of her attempts to help, loudly declares her a nightmare. It’s not tactful, and rather unkind; but Ron, Harry has found, is bluntly honest, and doesn’t sugar-coat things. Sometimes it’s refreshing; other times, Harry wants to kick him for it.

As Granger rushes off in tears, Harry sighs. For all that Ron was telling the truth, it isn't always necessary for the truth to be told.

Ron sees the look Harry gives him, and says uncomfortably, “Well, she _is_.”

No one sees Granger for the rest of the afternoon.

Harry puts her out of his mind, however, as they walk down to the Great Hall for the Halloween feast. Harry has mixed feelings about attending the feast. Although he doesn’t remember the event, tonight marks ten years since his parents were brutally murdered by a Dark Lord, and he was left an orphan on the Dursleys’ doorstep. Everyone else is celebrating Halloween, but Harry feels like... like he should be doing something else. He doesn’t know what, precisely, but... _something_. Something to mark the memory of the parents he was denied the chance to ever know.

So he’s in a pensive mood as he sits with the others and helps himself to the food, and maybe it’s just that it’s the anniversary of his parents’ death and Harry is oversensitive tonight, but there’s a restless feeling in the Force, like something’s about to happen.

Harry is only half-surprised when something does.

“Troll!” Professor Quirrell screams, throwing open the doors to the Great Hall. “Troll! In the dungeons! Thought you ought to know.” 

Harry watches in some disbelief as the man’s eyes roll back in his head and he keels over in a dead faint, while the rest of the Great Hall descends into pandemonium.

Professor Dumbledore calls for order, and the students listen, despite how frightened they are.

Harry still doesn’t know what to think of the headmaster. He seems like a kindly, twinkly-eyed old man... but he is a kindly, twinkly-eyed old man who holds several important positions of power, both in Britain and internationally. Harry does not trust kindly old men in positions of power. Professor Dumbledore doesn’t seem the type to abuse his position... but then neither did Palpatine, once upon a time.

The worst part, Harry thinks, is that there was a time he was deeply fond of Palpatine. It’s a bitter memory to recall, knowing how deeply he was fooled, but... Harry can’t deny that once, he looked up to Palpatine as a wise and benevolent mentor. Harry isn’t likely to make that mistake again, and he’s as watchful around the headmaster as he is all the other professors. More so, even. Perhaps the kindly headmaster facade is no facade at all, but Harry isn’t about to take any chances.

Professor Dumbledore sends the students back to their common rooms, but Harry suddenly remembers that Granger hasn’t been seen all afternoon. He searches the Gryffindor table for her as it empties of people, and can’t see her anywhere. 

An eleven year old girl is out there in the castle alone, with a troll on the loose, potentially in terrible danger.

Harry looks around for a teacher, but they’ve all gone in search of the troll, leaving the prefects to escort the remaining students to their common rooms. Harry tries to tell Ron’s brother the prefect about Granger, but the boy brushes him off, telling him to head to the common room with the others. Percy clearly isn’t about to listen to a mere first year, too busy enjoying the exercising of his authority during this potential crisis.

Harry groans in frustration, and turns to Ron.

“Head back to the common room. I’m going after Granger.”

“What?”

“She’s been missing all afternoon, remember? She won’t know about the troll,” Harry explains as patiently as he is able, remembering that he is dealing with a child. Ron’s eyes go wide, and consternation and guilt appears in them.

“I’ll come with you,” he says a moment later.

“Ron, you’re not equipped to handle a troll,” Harry says.

“What, and you are?” Ron asks, a tinge of colour appearing in his cheeks. “You might be good at spells, Harry, but you’re still a first year. You can’t handle a troll, either. And just because I’m not as good as magic as you doesn’t mean I’m _useless_.”

The Great Hall is nearly empty, the last of the students trailing out, and Harry holds back an exasperated sigh. Ron has a stubborn face on, ready to argue, and they don’t have time to argue about this. Harry just wants to find Granger, and get back to their common room.

He rubs a hand over his face, and wonders fleetingly if this is how Obi-Wan sometimes felt when Anakin was a padawan and insisted on getting into trouble.

“Fine,” Harry says, even though he doesn’t like this plan at all. “We go, we find Granger, then we go straight back to our common room, okay?”

“Okay,” Ron agrees, and they slip away from the edges of the crowd.

“I think I heard Parvati say she was in the girl’s toilets,” says Harry, and so they head in that direction. Halfway there they duck behind a statue to hide from Professor Snape, who stalks past with his robes billowing. When he’s gone, they continue on their way.

Only a couple of minutes later a foul stench reaches their noses, and they shrink back into the shadows as a huge, granite-grey figure lumbers down the hallway, dragging an enormous wooden club behind it. Harry keeps his eyes trained on the troll, barely daring to breathe, as it stops by a doorway and peers inside. A moment later the troll steps through the doorway, disappearing from view.

Mere seconds later there is a high, petrified scream.

“That’s the girl’s toilets, isn’t it?” Harry asks, because of _course_ it is, that’s just his luck. He doesn’t wait for an answer from Ron, already running for the doorway.

Inside the girl’s toilets Granger is flattening herself against the opposite wall, eyes huge with terror, too afraid to even scream now as the troll advances, knocking sinks off the walls with its club as it goes.

Harry swears loudly, and doesn’t bother with his wand. He’s only a first year, after all – he doesn’t know many spells useful for taking on a troll. Instead, he closes his eyes for an instant, and leans into the Force. When he opens his eyes again, they are full of determination. 

He makes a gesture with one hand, and the wooden club is ripped from the surprised troll’s grasp. While it stares up at the levitating club, Harry makes another gesture with his other hand, and Granger shrieks as she goes flying forward past the troll, towards Harry. He catches her with one arm, bolstering his miniscule strength with the Force as she slams into him, and gestures again with the hand that is still raised.

The floating club slams down onto the top of the troll’s head. There is a sickening _crack_ , and the troll staggers, lurches, and begins to topple backwards.

Harry grabs Granger and Ron and gives them a mighty shove forward using the Force, and propels himself after them both. The troll crashes to the floor behind them, the floor shaking with the impact, and Harry slams the door shut behind them with a wave of his hand. He looks immediately to Granger and Ron. Granger is shaking in the aftermath, adrenalin coursing through her system, and she stares at Harry like she’d never seen him before, shock and gratitude in her gaze.

But Ron is even paler than he was a moment ago, a look of dread affixed to his face, and his eyes are on something behind Harry.

Harry turns, and sees Professors McGonagall, Snape, and Quirrell standing there, staring at the three of them, most particularly Harry. Professor McGonagall looks absolutely livid, and Professor Snape looks little better. Professor Quirrell looks nervous.

“Mr Potter,” Professor McGonagall says, her voice shaking with fury. “Please tell me that you three did not just face down a troll alone.” 

“Professors,” Harry says: politely, but his voice is cold. “Granger wasn’t in the Great Hall when Professor Quirrell warned everyone about the troll. I tried to tell a prefect that she wasn’t there, but he wouldn’t listen, so Ron and I went to fetch Granger ourselves, intending to bring her back to the common room. We weren’t expecting to encounter the troll, but when it came after us we had little choice.”

“And what, Potter, did you _do_ to the troll?” Professor Snape asks, in his silkiest, most threatening voice.

Snape has been trying to get on Harry’s nerves ever since Harry arrived at Hogwarts. So far, Harry’s gritted his teeth and let it go, but now...

It’s almost a pleasure to look Snape in the eye and say, “We knocked it out using its own club, Professor.”

There is a disbelieving look on Snape’s face; but before he can speak Professor McGonagall says sharply, “And where _is_ the troll, Mr Potter?”

Harry looks at her. Then he silently opens the door to the girl’s toilets. As one the teachers move forward to peer through the doorway.

Professor Quirrell clutches his heart and looks faint, while Professors McGonagall and Snape stare in disbelief at the massive troll lying unconscious in the ruins of the girl’s toilets.

There is a silence. It is full of feelings.

“Well,” says Professor McGonagall finally, belatedly controlling her expression. “No doubt you were lucky, but not many first-years could have taken on a mountain troll by themselves. You each win Gryffindor five points. Professor Dumbledore will be informed of this. The three of you may return to your common room.”

They go without another word, but once they’re away from the teachers, Granger demands to know, “How did you _do_ that? Wandless magic is said to be impossible!” She looks more astonished than sceptical. 

Ron looks like he wants to know, too. Harry thinks about how best to answer. He says finally, “I used the Force.”

“The what?” Ron looks confused. So does Granger, but she hides it better.

“The Force is an energy field which is generated by all living things,” Harry says, hesitating on each word, unsure whether he is making a wise decision in telling them the truth. “Some people are sensitive to this energy field, and can be trained to use its power. I was trained.”

“That sounds very New-Age,” Granger says, after a moment. Harry huffs out a laugh, surprised. But then, he supposes, it _is_ the kind of mystical, semi-religious belief that would make the Dursleys frown in disapproval. 

But Harry was _born_ with his connection to the Force, knowing exactly what it is and what it can be used for – there is no room in his mind for doubt.

“I suppose it does,” he admits. “But that doesn’t make it any less true.”

“I’ve never heard of the Force before,” says Ron.

“I don’t think wizards know about it,” says Harry. “Which is just as well. Wizards are dangerous enough as it is.”

“You’re a wizard,” Granger points out.

“And I’m very dangerous,” Harry says. But he says it with a grin, and so even though he’s telling the truth, Granger clearly doesn’t believe him. She rolls her eyes.

Sometime after that, Harry realises that the three of them have become friends – him, Ron, and Granger, who has somehow become _Hermione_ rather than Granger. Ron doesn’t seem to mind, so Harry sighs, and gets used to shepherding around a pair of barely-adolescent wizards.

* * *

At Christmas, Hermione goes home for the holidays. Ron stays; he says that his parents are going to Romania to visit one of his elder brothers, so he and Percy and the twins are all staying at Hogwarts over the break. He doesn’t say what Ginny is doing, and Harry assumes that she will be going with her parents.

Harry is used to being bored in class, but now that it’s the holidays and there are no classes, he is, he finds, even more bored than usual. Ron delights in lounging around the common room, playing wizard’s chess and exploding snap with their housemates, and having snowball fights out in the snow. Harry, on the other hand, decides to get rid of his boredom via a different route. In a move that Hermione would approve, he goes to the library.

In another life, Harry passed the time by tinkering with machinery: droids, and shuttles, and spaceships. Here, the only technology around runs on magic, put together using runes and enchantments. Ancient Runes isn’t offered as an elective subject until third year, but Harry gets the beginner’s runes textbook out of the library anyway. There’s also a spellbook in the library which is filled with diagnostic spells, used to detect enchantments and curses. Harry gets that out, too. He figures it can only be useful.

One of the Gryffindor fifth years has an old wizarding wireless set which used to be his older sister’s. It’s old, and battered, and recently stopped working altogether. Harry talks the fifth year into giving it to him instead of throwing it away, and  vows that by the time classes start up again, he’ll have taken it apart and worked out how to put it back together, as good as new.

Harry has no way of buying presents in person for his new friends, but Seamus Finnegan tells him that some of the stores in Diagon Alley take mail orders by owl, so Harry writes to the bookstore and the Quidditch shop and asks for their catalogues. A day later order forms from both stores arrive at breakfast, along with the catalogues. Harry orders a book for Hermione, and a scarf in Chudley Cannons colours for Ron. Hopefully, they’ll both like their gifts. Harry also orders a box of chocolates for Hagrid. The man has tried to keep in touch with Harry, and Harry has a strong feeling Hagrid will be sending him a gift for Christmas. Sending him something in return is only polite.

Christmas morning dawns, and Harry is delighted by the small pile of presents at the end of his bed. There’s an envelope from the Dursleys, which Harry opens out of a sense of morbid curiosity: last year, for Christmas, they gave him a pair of second-hand bed-socks. This year, their present to Harry is a fifty-pence piece, which so fascinates Ron that Harry, amused, offers it to him for keeps.

The rest of Harry’s presents are more welcome.

“I told Mum you weren’t expecting any presents,” Ron says, peering at a very lumpy parcel by Harry’s bed in what appears to be suspicion. “I think that one’s from her.”

Harry puts down the whistle he’s just unwrapped (a present from Hagrid) and opens the lumpy parcel.

It turns out that the lumpy parcel is indeed from Mrs Weasley; it contains an emerald green jumper with an ‘H’ on the front and a large box of fudge. Harry, touched, makes a mental note to send Mrs Weasley a thank-you note. Ginny Weasley, meanwhile, has sent both Ron and Harry a Christmas card and a chocolate frog each.

_ Dear Harry _ , Harry’s card from Ginny reads, _I know that we are not particularly well-acquainted, but after hearing all about you in Ron’s letters home, I feel that I know you quite well. Therefore I hope you will excuse my forwardness in sending this. I wish you a merry Christmas and a happy New Year. Regards, Ginny Weasley._

Harry shows the card to Ron, who groans.

“Sorry,” he says. “Ginny can be a bit... strong-minded.”

“I happen to like strong-minded women,” says Harry, grinning. His grin widens when Ron sends him a scandalised look.

“Harry! That’s my _sister!_ ”

Harry ignores him, too busy opening Hermione’s present. Not that he means it, anyway: the only woman in the world for him is Padme, and she’s gone. Harry ignores the familiar hurt in his chest at the thought, and opens one of the chocolate frogs Hermione’s sent him.

But the final parcel at the foot of Harry’s bed is a neatly-wrapped present in plain red wrapping paper. When Harry opens it, something light and silvery slides out. 

It’s a cloak, as sleek as satin but lighter, and pale silver in colour. Ron gasps, and tells Harry to try it on. Under the cloak Harry disappears, the cloak with him – both of them invisible. Harry grins as he thinks of how useful such an item could be.

“There’s a note!” Ron says suddenly. “A note fell out of it!”

He picks up the note and looks at it, before passing it to Harry. Harry reads the narrow, looping handwriting.

_ Your father left this in my possession before he died. It is time it is returned to you. Use it well. A very merry Christmas to you. _

The smile fades from Harry’s face. He doesn’t know how to feel at the knowledge that this rare, useful item was his father’s. He remembers nothing of his parents. Maybe they should mean something to him, but the truth is, he cares more about Anakin’s mother than his parents from this life. But there is no denying there is a void in his life, left by the absence of Anakin’s wife and his mother; perhaps, if Harry’s parents had not been murdered, Harry would not feel the void so keenly. 

He wonders who the sender of the invisibility cloak is. For all Harry knows, it could be anyone, although the fact that Harry’s father trusted the mysterious sender with something so valuable suggests a high degree of trust between the two. Not that it helps: Harry has no idea who his father may have trusted. He knows his parents names , but nothing else. He’s never even seen a photograph of them.

Harry looks back at Ron, who is saying something about how he’d give anything to have an invisibility cloak. Harry doubts that he realises that Harry would trade it in an instant if it meant getting his loved ones back. But then, Ron is only eleven, Harry thinks, and it’s a fond thought rather than an irritated one. Harry’s friend isn’t well-enough acquainted with loss to understand that there are some things that cannot be traded for, and Harry is glad of it. Innocence is far too easily lost, and it’s good to know that Ron still has his.

So Harry smiles, a little sad, and says, “Just think what the two of us can use it for.” 

Ron heartily agrees.

The rest of Christmas Day is filled with fun and good food. Christmas dinner is the best dinner Harry has ever had, in this life or any other, and afterwards he and Ron and the other Weasley boys have a massive snowball fight in the grounds. Wet, but merrily grinning, the loft of them eventually return to the warmth of Gryffindor Tower to change into dry clothes. The evening is spent playing wizard’s chess with the chess set Harry got from a Christmas cracker during dinner. Now that Harry is getting to know the rules, he’s nearly as good as Ron, who’s been playing the game all his life. But then, Anakin and then Vader were forced by necessity to understand strategy, so perhaps it is not surprising that Harry is capable of almost matching Ron at a strategy came with which he is unfamiliar.

That night, when Ron is asleep, Harry lies awake for a while, feeling restless. His life has changed so much in the past few months, and it’s hard to adjust to. Harry has an uneasy feeling that sooner or later the other shoe is going to drop, and he’s going to discover the downsides to his new world. He’s seen glimpses of it already, in Malfoy’s elitist attitudes and Professor Snape’s bullying tactics. He is worried that far worse things lurk in this world.

Finally Harry climbs out of bed, resolved to do something to distract him from his grim thoughts. Pulling on his invisibility cloak, he slips down the stairs into the common room, and from there, out into the rest of the castle.

Harry hasn’t really had the chance to explore the castle properly, until now. There are always so many students around, and teachers ready to tell him off for looking for trouble. But the castle now is silent and near-empty. Harry sets off to explore it.

He makes his way all over the castle. There are empty classrooms and storage rooms filled with discarded objects. There is a surprisingly well-stocked armoury filled with weapons, all carefully oiled, and glinting in the light from Harry’s wand. There is even a room filled with nothing but a large collection of portraits, so old that the magic has faded from them, leaving them lifeless, the paint cracked and peeling. The library is strangely eerie in the darkness, and Harry makes his way to the Restricted Section.

Unfortunately, the first book he opens lets out an eldritch scream that echoes through the library and beyond. Harry slams the book shut, but the blood-curdling noise continues. Harry shoves the book back on the shelf and flees.

He ducks around Filch, who stares right through him, and runs down the corridor, ducking into the nearest empty classroom. When he turns around, Padme is staring back at him.

Harry’s breath hitches and his blood freezes. For a moment he can’t breathe, staring at his dead wife’s face, animated and very much alive.

“ _Padme?_ ” he says, his voice coming out choked and broken, his hand reaching out towards her. It takes him a moment to realise that she is looking at him from the centre of a magnificent golden frame, and that he can see his own reflection standing next to her, skinny and eleven years old and wearing a look of potent loss and longing that belongs to someone much older.

It’s a mirror, Harry realises, not a window; and his hope dies as his heart breaks, all over again. But Harry inches closer to the mirror, and Padme’s eyes follow him as though she can see him, even though he’s still wearing the invisibility cloak. 

Harry puts back the hood of his cloak, making his face visible.

“Padme?” he asks, and his voice sounds thin and lost in the silence of the room.

Padme smiles sadly at him, and reaches out to rest the palm of her hand against the other side of the glass. Harry places his smaller hand over hers, and can almost imagine, for a moment, that the two of them are touching.

It’s too much for him. He sinks to his knees, closing his eyes as tears swell behind his lids, choking out a sob. When he opens his eyes again, he’s _crying_ , unable to help it, and Padme has sunk to her knees opposite him, her hand pressed against the glass and her expression distressed like she wishes she could reach him.

Harry closes his eyes again, and sobs into the silence for a long time.

Finally, his breathing evens out, and quietens. Harry feels around in his pocket for a handkerchief and wipes his face and blows his nose. When he looks back at Padme, she is watching him with a look of sorrow on her face.

Harry presses his hand to the glass, and immediately Padme does the same. His eyes search her beloved features, looking to preserve them in his memory in as close to perfect detail as he can manage.

“Angel,” he says, and his voice is almost calm. “Are you real?”

Padme looks at him, and slowly shakes her head. She mouths something at him, and although there’s no sound, Harry can read her lips easily enough. 

_ I’m sorry. _

Amidst the terrible pain and loss in his heart, Harry feels rage rise up, and up. He clenches his fist.

“What purpose does this serve?” he demands, his voice hard and angry. Padme’s features are still achingly sad as she gets to her feet and points. It takes Harry a couple of seconds to realise that she’s pointing to an inscription above his head.

_ Erised stra ehru oyt ube cafru oyt on wohsi _ , the mirror says, as frustratingly mysterious as ever.

“I don’t know what that means,” says Harry. Padme looks at him until she’s sure she has his attention again, and begins mouthing words, slowly and carefully.

_ I show not your face, but your heart’s desire. _

“Oh,” says Harry, dully. “So this is all – it’s a trick.”

Padme nods, and Harry sees that her face is wet with tears.

Harry struggles for a moment, almost breaking into tears again: he regains control of himself with an effort.

“I miss you so much,” he tells her. And even though he knows she isn’t real, he stays by the mirror until the morning light begins slanting through the nearest window.

Harry spends the next day in a preoccupied daze. Padme might not have been real – but she had _seemed_ real enough. She had wept for him, and Harry can’t get that image out of his mind. He returns to the mirror again that night.

“Do you remember,” Harry says, “when we went out into the grasslands on Naboo, and I rode one of the shaaks, and fell off? You thought I was hurt at first, and then you realised I was laughing so hard I couldn’t speak. You didn’t know whether to be mad at me, or to laugh as well.”

Padme smiles a little, and nods. She doesn’t speak very often, this mirror-Padme, preferring to sit and listen; but when she does speak, Harry pays close attention, reading each word from her lips.

They sit and reminisce about happier times all night long. When Harry wakes the next morning, he feels almost drugged, he’s so tired. But all the same, he returns again that night.

Instantly, he knows something is different. Padme’s eyes dart to something in the corner, and Harry turns. After a moment’s keen staring, his eyes make out the outline of a person, perfectly camouflaged against the classroom wall.

“Show yourself!” Harry orders, and – 

It’s Professor Dumbledore who ripples into sight. He smiles benevolently at Harry. Harry feels the hairs rise on the back of his neck.

“You’ve been monitoring the mirror,” he realises, and Professor Dumbledore nods.

“Indeed. Men have wasted away before it, entranced by what they have seen, or been driven mad, not knowing if what it shows is real, or even possible. No student was ever supposed to find the mirror; but then, I see that you have been putting that cloak of yours to good use.”

Something about the way he says that makes Harry narrow his eyes.

“Did _you_ send it to me – sir?” He belated tacks on the ‘sir.’ 

“I did.” Professor Dumbledore looks at him for a moment, before saying gently, “You know, Harry, it does not do to dwell on dreams, and to forget to live.”

Harry feels his eyes sting, and something hot and angry uncoil in his chest.

“You know nothing, old man. You know _nothing_ of what I’ve lost.”

Professor Dumbledore doesn’t look angry at Harry’s blatant disrespect. Instead, he looks sad.

“The mirror will be moved to a new home tomorrow, Harry, and I must ask you not to go looking for it. The mirror contains neither knowledge, nor truth.”

Harry knows that Professor Dumbledore is right. His voice is wobbly as he says, “Will you at least let me say goodbye?”

Professor Dumbledore nods. Harry turns away from him, back towards the mirror. He steps forwards, and presses his palm to the glass. Padme does the same.

“I must go,” he tells her.

_ I love you _ , she mouths at him, and his mouth ticks up just a little.

“I wish that I knew that was true,” he says.

He lets Professor Dumbledore shepherd him out the door, and this time, when he leaves, he knows that he will never see his Padme again.  
 


	3. Voldemort

** Chapter Three **  
** Voldemort **

In the days that follow, Harry wonders, sometimes, why he didn’t see Luke or his daughter in the mirror. But then, the last he saw of Luke, the young man was safe and sound, Luke’s sister also presumably so, and in the end Anakin had finally done right by his son. Harry regrets hurting his son, regrets never knowing his daughter, but... mostly, he’s glad that they will live out the rest of their lives in a galaxy freed from Palpatine’s grasp.

By contrast, he has so much regret over what happened with Padme that burns in him still, so much regret and sorrow and guilt, and the deepest wish of his heart is that he had done things differently so that Padme had lived. Mixed up with that is the knowledge that he can never earn her forgiveness – not that he deserves it, he knows. But the wish is still there in his heart, however unspoken – and clearly, it was strong enough for the mirror to pick up on it. Mirror-Padme had forgiven him, and Harry aches for what can never be.

As classes start up again, Harry’s friends aren’t sure how to respond to this sombre, sadder Harry. Harry, for his part, does his best to put the mirror behind him: he only partially succeeds, his memories of Padme more painful to recall than ever. It feels a little like a partially-healed wound has been torn open all over again, to leave the mirror behind. But deep down, Harry knows that what he misses is the real Padme, and no magical facsimile could ever make him truly happy. But it had been so nice to look into mirror-Padme’s eyes, and see the move and forgiveness there, and to pretend that it was _real_...

It is fortunate that soon after the mirror incident something forces Harry out of his distracted brooding. That thing is a baby dragon.

Harry isn’t sure how Hagrid managed to even get hold of a dragon egg, but it is definitely a baby dragon that Hagrid’s hiding in his hut. Hagrid’s even given it a name: Norbert.

Harry has to rush outside before his emotions get the better of him. Hermione finds him outside the hut, doubled over laughing, and glares at him. 

“Harry, this isn’t funny!”

“Of course Hagrid named his dragon Norbert,” Harry gasps out in between guffaws. “Of _course!_ ”

“Everything all right?” Hagrid calls out.

“Fine, Hagrid!” Hermione calls back, and turns back to continue glaring at Harry.

“Mate,” Ron says, cautiously, like he’s worried Harry’s lost it, “Hermione’s right. I mean, it’s a _dragon_. It’s not going to be that little forever.”

“Just –give me a minute,” says Harry, because he knows they’re right, but every time he thinks of Hagrid saying _‘Yeh knows yer Mummy, don’t yeh, Norbert?’_ he starts laughing all over again.

Finally Harry sobers. Well, mostly.

“Your brother’s a dragon keeper, isn’t he?” Harry asks Ron, trying not to grin. He’s not sure he succeeds, if Hermione’s disapproving look is any indication. “Do you think he’d be willing to take Norbert?”

Ron brightens, and even Hermione looks a little impressed at Harry’s solution to the problem.

“Brilliant!” says Ron. I’ll send him an owl and ask.”

As it turns out, Charlie Weasley would be delighted to take a baby Norwegian Ridgeback, even though it means smuggling Norbert out of the country with a couple of his friends. The hard part is convincing Hagrid that he has to give Norbert up. 

By this point, Hagrid has progressed to singing Norbert lullabies every night. Harry no longer finds the situation funny. He wonders how lonely Hagrid must be to be treating a wild animal like a child of his own. Harry finds his thoughts drifting to Luke, and the mysterious daughter he never knew. He hopes that they’re doing well.

“I know it’s hard, Hagrid,” Harry says quietly. “But you have to do what’s best for Norbert, not what’s best for you. And you know the Ministry would never allow you to keep a dragon, especially here. They’d do something terrible to him.”

Beside him, Ron and Hermione nod in solemn agreement.

There’s something incredibly tragic about watching a man like Hagrid cry, but eventually he blows his nose and agrees to send Norbert away to the dragon sanctuary in Romania. It doesn’t feel to Harry like a victory. From the looks on Ron and Hermione’s faces, it doesn’t feel like one to them, either.

But half an hour before midnight on Saturday, they go down to Hagrid’s hut, where Norbert has been packed into a large crate. As Hagrid sobs his goodbyes, Harry levitates the heavy crate with a wave of his hand, and he and Ron and Hermione set off under the invisibility cloak. It’s somewhat nerve-wracking, sneaking around Hogwarts in the dark with an illegal dragon, and Ron and Hermione are on edge, jumping at every noise and stopping at every shadow. Eventually, however, they get to the top of Hogwarts’ tallest tower.

Charlie’s friends are already waiting, and Harry, Ron and Hermione take off the cloak as Harry lowers the crate to the ground. Charlie’s friends are cheerful enough about smuggling an illegal dragon, making chatty small-talk as they attach the crate to a harness suspended between the four broomsticks they arrived on. None of them ask how three first years got hold of a baby dragon.

Finally, Charlie’s friends swoop off into the night, and Harry and Ron and Hermione head back down the long, winding staircase. It’s only when they get to the bottom and Filch looms out of the darkness, smiling nastily, that they realise they left the invisibility cloak at the top of the tower.

Harry momentarily considers performing a mind-trick, but Obi-Wan was always better at mind-tricks than Anakin – in retrospect, Harry is rather disturbed by how often Obi-Wan relied on them. After all, when you think about it, it’s a very weak form of mind-control... and just because someone is susceptible to it doesn’t make using a mind-trick _right_. The Jedi always excused themselves by saying that mind-tricks worked only on the weak-minded, placing the blame on the mind-trick’s victim. But really, how is that fair?

So even though he knows they’re going to be in _so_ much trouble – even though he’s sorely tempted – Harry doesn’t use a mind-trick. Instead, he trails grimly after Filch, who escorts them to Professor McGonagall. She’s furious enough to take fifty points from Gryffindor – _each_. Harry and his friends are assigned detention with Hagrid.

Word soon gets around that three first-years are responsible for the massive dip in house points, and the rest of the house is rather frosty towards them for the next few days. Harry – who remembers living with far worse odium directed his way – continues on without caring all that much. He still has Ron and Hermione on his side, after all. But his two friends are visibly downcast by their housemates’ attitudes. The only ones who don’t seem to care are Fred and George Weasley: rather, they seem impressed that the three first-years managed to lose so many points in one go. Ron tells them to shove off.

“Harsh words, Ron,” one of the twins tells him, and ruffles his hair before both twins disappear again.

Harry’s scar has been prickling on and off ever since he started at Hogwarts, but in the days that follow, it prickles so often that Harry finds himself constantly rubbing at it, without realising what he’s doing. The night that he and his friends go down to meet Hagrid for their detention, Harry’s scar has been prickling all day, and he’s irritable as a result. 

Hagrid leads the three of them into the Forbidden Forest, before splitting them up into two groups to go searching for an injured unicorn. Hagrid takes Hermione with him to follow one shining trail of unicorn blood – she’s visibly terrified at the thought of going into the Forest – and sends Harry and Ron out on their own to follow another.

Ron is pale and afraid, and Harry glances at him. He’s not sure who thought it was a good idea for three first-years to be sent into such dangerous territory as the Forbidden Forest, but he doesn’t think much of their decision.

“Don’t worry,” says Harry. “If we run into anything dangerous, I’ll protect you.”

Ron snorts at that, but looks a little reassured. He keeps clutching his wand, though, ready to send up sparks if they find the injured unicorn – or whatever attacked it.

Harry and Ron move deeper and deeper into the Forest, following the silvery trail by the light from Harry’s wand. The trees become thicker and taller, until it’s almost impossible to walk between them. Harry has a feeling that the unicorn was trying to hide, to get away from something, to come so far into the deep, dark parts of the forest.

Finally, after at least half an hour of walking, Harry and Ron round a tree and emerge into a large clearing, and there at the other end of it is the unicorn.

It’s dead. Even in death, however, it’s a fragile, beautiful thing, gleaming pale white in the darkness. Harry has rarely seen anything so beautiful or sad. He approaches it slowly.

“Oh, _no_ ,” Ron says, staring in distress and pity at the dead creature. But Harry shushes him sharply, and Ron hears what Harry heard a second earlier: something slithering over the leaves, drawing closer.

Harry raises his wand higher, to cast the light radiating from it over a wider area, and readies himself. He feels the Force flow through him, and casts everything from his thoughts but for the here and now.

As Harry watches, a cloaked figure crawls over the ground, in the shadows where the unicorn lies. It lowers its cloaked head to the wound on the unicorn’s side, and to Harry’s utter revulsion, begins to drink the unicorn’s blood.

Ron makes a sound of incoherent horror, and the cloaked head snaps up, turning in their direction. In the same instant, pain pierces Harry’s forehead, terrible and almost impossible to ignore. Harry gasps, reeling backward, and does his best to focus on the Force, rather than the pain.

Ron screams in terror, and Harry looks up again in time to see the cloaked figure moving swiftly towards them. Harry throws out his free hand, and the figure is flung backwards, into the trunk of the nearest tree. There is a sickening cracking sound, and the figure falls to the ground. It rises, staggers, and begins moving unsteadily towards them once more.

Harry clutches Ron’s arm and hauls him back the way they came. 

“Run!” Harry bellows, and both of them do so.

Harry can feel the cloaked figure at the edges of his senses, his scar burning like it’s about to split open any minute. There’s no time to send up sparks, not with this monster chasing them. Harry does not hesitate in calling it a monster. Anything which would kill something as innocent and beautiful as a unicorn, and drink its blood... 

What Harry would give to have a lightsaber in this moment.

There is the sound of hooves up ahead near the edge of the clearing, and Harry throws himself flat, pulling Ron down with him, as a large dark shape leaps over their heads, heading straight for the monster. 

Harry looks back over his shoulder and sees that it is a centaur, rearing up and kicking at the monster with its front legs. The monster flees into the darkness, and the centaur falls back onto all fours, and comes cantering back towards Harry and Ron. The pain in Harry’s forehead subsides, leaving only a dull ache instead of the burning agony of before.

The centaur’s eyes linger on Harry’s forehead, as Ron sits there and gapes at their rescuer.

“Are you all right?” the centaur asks.

“We are. Thank you for your assistance,” says Harry, getting to his feet and helping Ron to his feet.

“What – what _was_ that?” Ron asks, stammering a little, still half-scared out of his mind.

The centaur looks at them gravely, just as there is the sound of more hooves, and two other centaurs burst through the trees.

“Firenze, what have you done?” one of them bellows, pawing at the ground with his front hooves and looking angry. “We have sworn not to set ourselves against the heavens. Have we not read what is to come in the movement of the planets? It is not our business to run around like donkeys after stray humans in our forest!”

Firenze looks back at the other centaurs, and his mouth thins.

“Have you not seen the unicorns, lying dead?” he demands. “Do you not understand why they were killed? Or have the planets not let you in on that secret? I set myself against what is lurking in this forest, Bane, yes, with humans alongside me if I must.”

Bane starts forward, and Firenze tenses, and for a moment Harry thinks they’re going to start a brawl, right there. He takes a deep breath.

“ _ENOUGH!”_

Harry’s voice rings through the forest, far louder than should be possible. The heads of the centaurs turn towards him, and Harry fixes them with an unyielding look.

“I don’t understand what is going on here,” he says, in a voice which makes it clear that the admission is not a weakness, “but I would think that anyone would oppose any being so depraved as to kill something as innocent as a unicorn and drink its blood.”

“He is right,” says Firenze. Bane looks furious; the third centaur, who hasn’t yet spoken, looks uneasy. “You know what a terrible thing it is to slay a unicorn and drink its blood.”

“Why would anything _want_ to drink unicorn blood?” Ron pipes up, looking nervous and confused.

“The blood of a unicorn will keep you alive, even if you are an inch from death, but at a terrible price,” says Firenze, keeping an eye on Bane. “You have slain something pure and defenceless to save yourself and you will have but a half-life, a cursed life, from the moment the blood touches your lips.”

Ron looks intimidated by this answer.

“But who would be that desperate?” Harry asks, quietly.

In the same instant as Bane says, “Do not say a word, Firenze,” Firenze responds: “Can you think of nobody who has waited many years to return to power, who has clung to life, awaiting their chance?”

For a moment Harry is confused. But then he thinks of the still-lingering pain in his scar, the legacy from the night Voldemort tried to kill him and vanished instead; the curse scar which had burst into agony when the unicorn-slaying monster had gotten too close. At the same time, he remembers that no one truly knows what happened to the Dark Lord – and thinks of Hagrid saying, _‘Some say he died. Codswallop, in my opinion...’_

In a burst of intuition, Harry puts it all together.

“Voldemort,” he says, and hears Ron squeak at the name. “But why, of all the places in the world, come here?”

“Do you know what is hidden in the school in this very moment?” Firenze asks, and Bane gallops towards him with a furious roar. For a moment it looks like there will be a battle here and now, but the next minute Bane is lifted into the air, astonishment in his face.

“I would appreciate it if you would refrain from physical violence while in my presence,” Harry says, and although none of the others know it, that cold, commanding voice is his Vader voice, even though it comes out in a higher pitch than Vader’s ever did. Bane yells in wordless fury, legs kicking against the empty air. Harry eyes the centaur dispassionately. 

Harry feels angry, and annoyed; but most of all, he feels tired. Because if Voldemort is still alive, Harry has a horrible feeling that _destiny_ will come into play, just as he has feared ever since he first learned about wizard magic, and Voldemort, and his own miraculous survival against the killing curse ten years ago.

True miracles are rare, and in Harry’s experience, tend to mean that the Force still has a task for someone to carry out. So far there hasn’t been an ancient prophecy pertaining to him, this time around – but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything.

“Are you using the Force?” Ron whispers loudly – loud enough for Firenze to hear. His head turns.

“The Force?” Firenze asks, and Harry breathes out in irritation.

“It is an energy field generated by all living things,” he says, and Firenze’s eyes turn sharp in the same moment as Bane goes still in mid-air. The third centaur looks startled.

“We know of this energy field,” Firenze says. “It is said that there were once beings, humans included, who were sensitive to this energy field, and who could use it to do extraordinary things. But those beings died long ago, and their ways were lost.” 

“Impossible!” Bane says; but the fight has gone out of him as he stares at Harry. “There has been no sign of this –”

“Has there not?” the third centaur interrupts, a little hesitantly. “Mars _is_ bright, tonight.”

There is a long silence, as though this means something important and troubling to the centaurs.

“Put me down, child,” Bane says at last, and the aggression is gone from his voice. Harry lowers the centaur to the ground. “You should leave this forest. It is no place for you.”

“Hagrid sent us out to find the injured unicorn,” says Harry.

“You may tell him that you found it,” says Firenze. “Come. I will lead you back to the edge of the forest.”

Harry nods to the other centaurs, before following Firenze, pulling Ron behind him. It takes a good twenty or thirty minutes walk before they near the edge of the Forbidden Forest.

The first thing Harry hears is Professor McGonagall’s voice. 

“..didn’t expect you to take them into the _Forbidden Forest_ , Rubeus!” she says, and she sounds beyond enraged.

“ _Look!_ ” Hermione shrieks, as Firenze leads Harry and Ron out of the Forbidden Forest. Harry sees Professor McGonagall standing with Hermione and Hagrid, who looks worried and abashed.

Hagrid and Professor McGonagall appear unutterably relieved to see Harry and Ron.

“Here is where I leave you,” Firenze says.

“Thank you,” Harry says, and Firenze nods, and disappears back into the forest.

Professor McGonagall comes striding over, Hermione hurrying behind her.

“Are both of you unharmed?” Professor McGonagall asks, looking them up and down, clearly checking them for injury.

“We are,” Harry says, and treads on Ron’s foot before Ron can say anything about their encounter with the monster in the forest.

“I’m so glad you’re okay!” Hermione says, hugging them both. “I was so worried! You’ve been missing for hours!”

“We found the unicorn,” says Harry. “It was dead.”

Professor McGonagall purses her lips, and says, “Yes, well. These things happen, unfortunately. The Forbidden Forest is a dangerous place, forbidden for a reason. Come along. I will escort you back to your dormitories.”

She shoots one last, angry glance at Hagrid, who looks miserable, before sweeping back towards the castle.

Harry and Ron and Hermione follow her.

The next day, Harry finds his invisibility cloak sitting on the end of his bed, behind the curtains, with a note in Professor Dumbledore’s handwriting saying, _Just in case._

* * *

Now that he knows that Voldemort is potentially out there in the Forbidden Forest, killing unicorns to keep himself from death, Harry’s thoughts go into overdrive.

_ ‘Do you know what is hidden in the school in this very moment? _ ’ Firenze had asked – and Harry doesn’t. But he intends to find out. Voldemort may be evil and twisted, but Harry doesn’t trust Professor Dumbledore, either. If something is hidden in this school, something that Voldemort wants... well, Harry doesn’t trust either the Dark Lord or the Professor to have it.

He waits until the day after exams are finished. There is no sign of Professor Dumbledore at breakfast, and the Force warns Harry that now is the time to go investigating. Harry leaves Ron playing chess against Neville in the common room, and Hermione reading in the library. He slips away quietly to the third-floor corridor, and unlocks the door.

Harry read in his textbook that the three-headed cerberus is lulled to sleep by music, and so the moment he open the door, he begins to sing. It’s an old tune he remembers from his childhood, asking for the blessings of the desert. He might not remember exactly what all the words mean, anymore, but it’s – not _easy_ , but not difficult, either, to recall the words of the song as the tune runs through his mind. 

For a moment he wonders why it’s _this_ tune that springs to mind right now, of all the tunes he’s heard in his life, before smiling, rather wryly. He’s about to head into trouble – why shouldn’t he remember the song his mother used to sing under her breath, when there was a bad moon rising above the dunes, or a particularly bad sandstorm brewing? He shakes his head, still singing, and walks into the third-floor corridor.

A harp lies abandoned on the floor, and Harry suspects that someone else has already come this way. If it is Voldemort... well. Harry had best hurry, then.

The three-headed dog is asleep, now, and Harry opens the trap-door by its feet as it slumbers, and jumps down into the darkness. He lands on something soft and pliant. 

“ _Lumos_ ,” he mutters, and light blooms at the end of his wand, even as he feels something twist, snake-like, around his ankles.

Harry is surrounded by tangled vines, and even as he watches, they snake further up his legs, tangling him in their tightening embrace.

Harry swears in Huttese, Anakin’s go-to language for times like these. He doesn’t know what this plant is, or how to stop it, but there are two things that usually work – slicing, and burning.

H casts a cutting spell at the nearest vine, which is sliced in half... and the other vines move even faster to pull him into their coils.

“Burning it is, then,” Harry mutters, and yells, “ _Incendio!_ ”

The nearest vine catches fire, and withers away in an instant. The rest of the plant squirms to get away from the heat of the flames, and Harry is able to shrug off the remaining vines, his robes smouldering slightly where the burning vines were wrapped around him.

He continues onward down the stone passageway. Pretty soon, he hears a soft rustling and clinking, and moves more cautiously. He emerges into a brilliantly-lit room with a high, arching ceiling. Small, glinting winged things are fluttering all over the room. Harry laughs when he realises that they’re keys. Across the other side of the room is a heavy wooden door, with an old-fashioned silver door-lock and handle. Several broomsticks lie on the floor. It’s not hard to deduce the expected next move.

Harry looks up, searching for a key to match the door, big and old-fashioned in style, and sees one key which wobbles slightly as it flies. One wing is bent, as though the key has been caught and stuffed roughly into a keyhole.

Harry grins in triumph, and doesn’t bother with a broom. Instead he draws on the Force, and tugs the key down towards him. He fits it carefully into the door, and turns. The lock clicks open, and the key takes flight again.

Harry finds himself standing on the edge of an enormous chessboard, surrounded by life-sized chessmen. Their heads turn towards him as he enters, and Harry has a feeling this task isn’t going to be as easy as the last two. 

Harry eyes the gigantic figures, and approaches one. 

“Excuse me,” he says, because if there’s going to be trouble as it is, there’s no point in inviting extra trouble along by being rude. “Do I have to take the place of one of you and play the game to get across?”

The pawn nods, and Harry sighs.

“I was afraid of that.”

He ends up taking the place of one of the knights, and begins directing the black pieces. The game is long and difficult, and Harry uses every bit of strategy he has to play his way across the board.

For a horrible moment, he can’t see his way out – but then he realises that there is a move ahead of him which could win him the game, if the white pieces don’t catch on. He plays, hiding his ultimate move until the last minute. Then he moves himself three spaces to the left.

“Checkmate,” Harry says, and the white kings throws his crown at Harry’s feet, and the rest of the pieces on the board move out of Harry’s way, clearing a path to the doorway on the other side of the chamber.

Harry walks through the doorway and passes an unconscious troll, and is glad he doesn’t have to deal with this one. It’s even bigger than the one he faced at Halloween.

As he enters the next room, purple flames spring up in the doorway behind Harry. At the same moment, black flames appear in the doorway ahead, leaving Harry unable to go forward, or back.

There is a table in the centre of the room with seven differently-shaped bottles standing in a line on top of it, a piece of parchment lying next to them. Harry picks up the piece of parchment, and reads it. It’s a riddle.

Unfortunately, Harry has never been very good at riddles. He looks back at the flames in the doorway ahead, and concentrates. The flames part for a second or two, before more flames rush to take their place.

Either Harry has to solve the riddle, in which case he might be stuck here forever, or else he has a window of about a second and a half to get through the flames.

Harry takes a deep breath, and starts to run. Just as he reaches the flames he reaches out with the Force, and the flames part just long enough for Harry to launch himself through the doorway into the room beyond, landing on the floor. He rolls clumsily to his feet, his body unfamiliar with the manoeuvre, and looks around.

Professor Quirrell is there, looking back at him, and there is nothing nervous in the Professor’s face at all, only cold, clear purpose.

Harry can feel the warmth of the flames at his back, and steps forward, watching Quirrell warily. Behind the professor is a familiar, gilded mirror that fills the space from floor to ceiling.

“I wasn’t expecting to meet you here, Professor,” Harry says, never taking his eyes off the man.

“Naturally not. Who would suspect p-poor, st-stuttering P-Professor Quirrell?” Quirrell drops the stutter, and smiles. There’s something _wrong_ about the expression. “It’s a pity you decided to make your way down here, boy. A pity for you, that is.”

He snaps his fingers, and ropes spring out of thin air and wrap themselves around Harry – an apparent use of impressive wandless magic. Anyone else might have been intimidated by it, but Harry... 

Harry has seen far more impressive things. Instead of feeling fear, he tests the ropes binding him. They’re tied tightly, and it’s going to take a couple of minutes of working at them using his Force abilities before he can get free.

Quirrell turns his back on Harry, and turns back to the magnificent mirror behind him. He stares hungrily into the mirror, muttering to himself.

“I see the Stone... I’m presenting it to my master... but where is it?”

“What stone?” Harry asks. Quirrell glances back at him.

“The Philosopher’s Stone, you stupid boy. Dumbledore hid it here, somehow. I will find it, and my master will be restored to his previous might and glory, and I shall be the most rewarded of his servants.”

Harry eyes Quirrell with well-hidden disgust as the man turns away from him. There are always those who make themselves willing slaves to a master, craving power, even though they have so many other choices. Harry does not understand how that is something anyone can choose but in the most desperate of circumstances.

But Quirrell, it seems, has bartered away his freedom for the illusory promise of power, and does not even realise it. Harry knows better.

“What does this mirror do?” Quirrell says, after several long minutes. “How does it work? Help me, master!”

To Harry’s surprise, someone _responds_.

“ _Use the boy...”_ a voice whispers, thin and thready and barely-there, but audible nonetheless. Quirrell whirls to face Harry, while Harry is trying to work out why the voice sounds like it’s coming from Quirrell himself.

“I won’t help you,” Harry says, before Quirrell can say anything. “I refuse.”

Quirrell’s eyes fill with frustrated anger, but the voice speaks again.

“ _Let me speak to him... face to face...”_ it says, and Quirrell looks alarmed.

“Master, you are not strong enough!”

“ _I have strength enough... for this...”_

To Harry’s mystification, Quirrell begins to unwrap his ever-present turban. Then he turns, slowly, and Harry’s eyes widen as he is faced with something unexpected.

There is a terrible face on the back of Quirrell’s head, chalk-white with glaring red eyes, and slits for nostrils. It isn’t remotely human.

Harry recovers from his surprise, and says dryly, “Lord Voldemort, I presume.”

“Harry Potter,” says Voldemort. “See what I have become? Mere shadow and vapour... I have form only when I can share another’s body... but there have always been those willing to let me into their hearts and minds... Unicorn blood has strengthened me, these past few weeks... you saw faithful Quirrell drinking it for me in the forest... and once I have the Stone – the Elixir of Life – I will be able to create a body of my own... now, why don’t you assist me?”

“Why should I?” Harry asks, looking into that terrible face without fear. 

Voldemort smiles, dark and cajoling.

“Power, Harry Potter... power, by my side. You could be great... you have such potential.  There is no good or evil, only power, and those too weak to seek it,” he says – 

– and Harry _laughs_ , the laugh of a man who has ruled a galaxy at his master’s bidding, the laugh of a man who was the most powerful person in the galaxy, save for one other – and found that it brought him neither joy nor peace.

Quirrell flinches at the sound, and even Voldemort looks off-balance as Harry laughs and laughs.

Finally he stops, and shakes his head, and looks up; and his smile is dark.

“Power by your side? Is that all you have to offer me? Let me tell you something, _Voldemort_ –” and Harry steps forward, the ropes binding him falling away even though Quirrell has not released him, “I have known power. I have seen planets burn and worlds kneel in supplication at the whims of a power-hungry madman far greater than you. I have been the most powerful man in an entire galaxy – but for one. _Never again_.”

With a flick of Harry’s hand Quirrell’s wand is torn from his grip, and Harry clenches his fist. Quirrell chokes, and clutches at his throat, but Harry does not let go. As the seconds pass, Quirrell falls to his knees, Voldemort hissing threats and terrible promises at Harry. But the seconds continue ticking over, and Quirrell slumps over, out cold.

Finally, Harry hesitates – because it would be so easy to keep going, to continue that iron grip around Quirrell’s throat... but Harry doesn’t want to be that person, anymore. Harry relaxes his grip, and hears Quirrell’s body suck in a great gasp of air.

“I will kill you, Harry Potter!” Voldemort shrieks, his expression contorted in fury. 

Harry smiles grimly.

“Not if I kill you first,” he says.

It’s another ten minutes before the flames in the doorway vanish, and Professor Dumbledore steps through. His eyes go straight to the angry face on the back of Quirrell’s head, which lets out a howl of rage.

“Tom,” says Professor Dumbledore, with what is remarkable calm, under the circumstances.

There is another wordless scream from Voldemort, and then... the back of Quirrell’s head _bubbles,_ and almost _melts_ away, the terrible face sagging and disappearing. In the same moment, a dark shadow leaves the back of Quirrell’s head, and flits through the nearest wall, out of reach.

Quirrell gives a quiet sigh, and stops breathing.

Professor Dumbledore goes to Quirrell immediately, and checks the man’s pulse. When he straightens, his face is filled with resigned sorrow.

“He’s dead, isn’t he?” asks Harry. Any other child would be near-catatonic with horror and fear by now, but Harry looks grimly at what used to be the back of Quirrell’s head, and knows that it’s unlikely anyone could have survived the back of their head collapsing like that.

Professor Dumbledore sends him a grave look.

“I am afraid so, Harry.”

Harry doesn’t say ‘ _good_ ,’ but only because he knows that it would give Professor Dumbledore the wrong idea. He isn’t about to mourn a man who willingly gave himself over to Voldemort, and Quirrell being dead solves the nasty problem of what to do with someone willing to host the Dark Lord within himself, when most of the world believes said Dark Lord to be dead.

Of course, it does come with the equally nasty problem of how to explain the death of the Defense professor, but that is Professor Dumbledore’s problem, not Harry’s.

Professor Dumbledore looks at Harry. Harry looks back at him.

“Professor,” Harry finally says. “Why did Voldemort try to kill my family, ten years ago?”

All of a sudden, the question seems important.

Professor Dumbledore sighs, and looks aged.

“Alas... I cannot tell you that, Harry. Not today. Not now. When you are older... you will know. When you are ready. Until then, you must trust me.”

Harry clenches his fists.

“I only trust those who have proven themselves trustworthy, Professor,” he says, his voice filled with carefully-controlled anger. “I don’t trust those who speak in half-truths, or hold back information that could keep me alive. And I do not trust old men with power, nor those who think only of the bigger picture, of _the greater good_.”

Professor Dumbledore’s calm visage shatters as something that Harry has said hits home, and hits _hard_. For a moment his expression is a snapshot of pain and grief and bone-deep remorse, emotions with which Harry is intimately familiar. Then the Professor’s expression smooths over, back into the look of weary sadness. But Harry knows what he has seen.

“You got someone killed, didn’t you?” he asks softly, and sees the Professor flinch. “Someone dear to you.”

And oh, Harry wants to be _angry_ , but he understands all too well how Professor Dumbledore feels, and the anger drains away, leaving him feeling tired and sad.

Professor Dumbledore takes an uneven breath.

“How did you know?” he asks, and gone is the Professor’s aura of power and authority, leaving nothing but an old man full of regrets.

Harry reminds himself that this could all be a trick, but... he thinks of Palpatine, who never had a genuine moment of remorse or grief in his life, and compares him to Professor Dumbledore. Harry still does not trust the man, but in this moment, he is certain that Professor Dumbledore is no Palpatine.

“The look on your face,” he responds softly. “I’ve seen it before.”

Professor Dumbledore looks at him, then; just _looks_ at him, and asks: “Harry... who did you see, in the Mirror of Erised?”

Harry laughs, the sound bitter and devoid of humour.

“Maybe I’ll tell you, on the day you tell me why Voldemort came after my family,” he suggests. 

Professor Dumbledore sighs, accepting this statement, and looks back at where Quirrell lies. He turns his back on the dead man, and gestures to Harry.

“Come, Harry. Let us return to the rest of the castle. I think it would be best if Madam Pomfrey had a look at you, before you return to your friends...”

And although Harry still doesn’t trust the Professor... just for a moment, he decides to act like the eleven year old boy he is. So he nods without a word, and follows Professor Dumbledore as he walks towards the way out. 


	4. Padme

** Chapter Four **  
** Padme **

After an entire school year spent at Hogwarts, it’s difficult to return to the Dursleys. But return Harry does. Neither Ron nor Hermione quite understand why he is so gloomy at the thought of returning to his relatives, but they both promise to write to him, all the same.

The first few weeks pass more or less peacefully. Harry’s relatives are clearly afraid of him, now that he has learned magic, and avoid him whenever they can. This suits Harry just fine. They still don’t feed him as much as they ought to, and after a school year of decent meals Harry definitely feels the lack of food, but... well, it’s a better reception than Harry expected.

But  Harry’s friends don’t return his letters, and then there’s a house-elf that doesn’t want Harry to return to school. It tries to get Harry into trouble by levitating the pudding Petunia made for the special guests the Dursleys have invited  for dinner – Harry catches it using the Force before it hits the floor, so expertly that not a candied violet is out of place; but there’s a scream from one of Petunia and Vernon’s guests as an owl comes swooping through the window with a letter. It’s from the Improper Use of Magic Office, warning him not to use magic outside school. Out in the dining room, Harry’s uncle excuses himself and goes to find Harry in the kitchen: he snatches the letter out of Harry’s hands, and reads it.

When Vernon finishes reading the letter, he is smiling. Harry has a bad feeling.

“You didn’t tell us you weren’t allowed to use magic outside school,” says Vernon. “Slipped your mind, I daresay...”

Harry knows, with certainty, that no good will come of this. He’s right.

The next day Vernon has bars put on Harry’s window, and installs a cat-flap and several locks on Harry’s door. Three times a day, a tiny amount of food is pushed through the cat-flap for Harry to eat. Morning and evening, Harry is let out to use the bathroom, and Petunia refills the jug of water sitting on the dresser in Harry’s room. The rest of the time, Harry is locked in his bedroom.

Harry spends two days meditating and trying to ignore the deep well of anger and resentment that is building in him – not to mention the hunger pangs at the pit of his stomach.

On the third day, Harry decides that enough is enough. He waits until Petunia and Vernon and Dudley go out to dinner that night, and then tears the locks off the door using the Force. He collects his trunk from where it’s locked in the cupboard under the stairs, Harry’s old bedroom, and leaves the Dursley household, heading out into the night.

He isn’t sure exactly where to go, or what to do. Ron’s mother had been kind enough to send him a Christmas present... perhaps he can convince her to let him stay with her family for the holidays, if he offers to pay for food and board. If not...

Well, Harry’s resourceful. He’ll work something out.

Harry walks several blocks, dragging his trunk behind him, and then sticks out his wand, the way Ron had once described to him and Hermione when Hermione had asked about magical forms of transport. There’s a loud _bang_ , and a bright purple, triple-decker bus pulls up alongside Harry.

The conductor is curious at the sight of a preteen boy in oversized muggle clothing catching the bus alone at this time of night, but Harry deflects his questions, gives his name as Anakin Skywalker when asked, and pays for a ticket to Ottery St Catchpole, which is the suburb where Ron lives. For an extra two sickles he also gets a cup of hot chocolate.

Inside the bus, there are somewhere between half a dozen and a dozen beds, and Harry sits down on one, using the Force to levitate his trunk, placing it beside him on the bed. As soon as the bus starts up again, the beds begin sliding across the floor, and Harry holds onto the bed-post with one hand while trying to drink his hot chocolate with the other, doing his best not to slosh the hot chocolate down the front of his shirt as the bus turns corners. The other passengers all seem rather alarmed, and a couple seem to have motion-sickness, but honestly, Harry is rather enjoying the trip. He always did like to go fast, as Obi-Wan was always willing to dryly attest to.

Eventually the bus stops, and the conductor shouts out, “Ottery St Catchpole!” and Harry gets off the bus, levitating his trunk beside him using the Force. The bus lets out another _bang_ , and vanishes, leaving Harry all alone in the darkness.

There are houses around him, some with their lights on, some without, but none of them look like the house Ron has described to him. According to Ron, his house is several stories high, bits having been added-on here and there throughout the years. Harry shrugs, and starts walking.

He walks to the end of the street, and from there, some distance away from the little village, he can see a large building that towers over the other houses in the area. Harry heads towards it. As he grows close, he can make out a tall, crooked house with four or five chimneys; there is a sign stuck in the ground near the front door, and as Harry approaches, he can just make out the words by the pale moonlight. 

_ The Burrow _ , the sign reads, and Harry knows he has the right house. He looks up at it. All of the lights are out, and Harry wonders for the first time how late it is; it felt like he was on the bus for a couple of hours, at least. He wishes he could use his wand to cast a _tempus_ charm to check the time, but doesn’t dare use magic in case he is expelled. 

Harry isn’t entirely sure what to do. He doesn’t want to wake everyone in the house, if they’ve gone to sleep already. He looks around the front garden, and walks around the side of the house. 

There’s a tumbledown garage, and Harry lifts up the garage door, wincing as it squeals loudly. Inside the garage is an old Ford Anglia which fills most of the space, but at the far end is a work-table with tools on it. That part of the garage is tidy and clean. Harry walks towards it. He leaves his trunk next to the car and crawls under the work-table, into the clean, dry space, and curls up on the floor. It’s hard and uncomfortable, but Harry is so hungry and tired that he falls asleep anyway, with his head pillowed on his arm.

He wakes suddenly, with the knowledge that someone is watching him. He opens his eyes slowly and cautiously, to see a middle-aged man with hair the same colour as Ron’s staring at him.

For a moment they just stare at each other.

“I –I’m sorry,” Harry blurts out, for once feeling no older than eleven. “I didn’t know where else to go.”

“Have you been there all night?” the man who must be Ron’s father asks; gently, like he’s afraid of spooking Harry. 

Harry nods.

“Well, you’d better come into the house,” Ron’s father decides. “What’s your name?”

“Harry.”

At that, Mr Weasley blinks, and his eyes go to Harry’s forehead.

“Harry Potter?” 

Harry nods again.

“Ron will be relieved, then. He’s been worried about the fact that you haven’t been responding to his letters.”

“I didn’t get them,” Harry says, as Ron’s father helps him crawl out from under the work-table and to his feet. Harry is gently herded out of the garage, into the back yard, and from there into the house. 

He stops in the doorway of a small, cramped kitchen full of red-heads eating breakfast. Mr Weasley pats him on the shoulder, and says loudly, “Molly, look who I found sleeping in the garage.”

Four heads turn, including Mrs Weasley’s; Ron lets out a shout of “ _Harry!_ ” and he leaps to his feet, pushing back his chair and crossing the space between him and Harry in an instant.

“Blimey, Harry, you had me worried!” says Ron, looking relieved and delighted. “Me and Hermione were going spare, wondering why you weren’t answering any of our letters. What happened?” He blinks, and adds, “Not that I’m not glad to see you, but what are you doing here?”

Mr Weasley, Mrs Weasley, and the twins all look at Harry like they’d like to know the answer to that as well. Percy and Ginny aren’t there; presumably, they’re still asleep.

Harry hesitates.

“My relatives, they... they aren’t very nice people,” he says finally. “And they hate magic.”

There are expressions of varying levels of comprehension from the Weasleys. Mr and Mrs Weasley share a look of grim understanding.

“Well, Harry dear, you’re welcome to stay here for the rest of the summer,” Mrs Weasley says brightly. “Why don’t you sit down, and I’ll make you some breakfast?”

And just like that, Harry has somewhere to stay.

* * *

Later, as Harry sits and watches Ron and his brothers de-gnome the garden – one of their least favourite chores, apparently, although to Harry they seemed to be having fun, getting into a competition to see who can fling gnomes the furthest distance from the house – Ginny Weasley takes a seat next to him on the front steps.

“So, Harry,” she says, and then adds, “you don’t mind me calling you ‘Harry,’ do you?”

“Honestly, I prefer Anakin, but the world knows me as Harry Potter, so Harry will do,” says Harry idly, There is a choked noise, and Harry glances in Ginny’s direction to see a look which might be terror or might be hope cross her face.

Harry wonders what he’s said, to make her look like that, but then...

“ _Anakin?_ ” Ginny says, shaken and off-balance. “Not...” She swallows. “ _Skywalker?_ ”

Harry feels himself go tense with shock. 

“How do you know that name?” he asks, and his voice is full of command. Ginny flinches back at the sound of it, but when she meets his eyes, her own are filled with unexpected steel, even though she’s shaking.

“In another life, it was a name very well-known to me.”

_ ‘In another life?’ _ Harry feels cold all over. The Force is _screaming_ at him, telling him that he’s on the brink of something which will turn his world upside down, and Harry is terrified of finding out what it is, even as he’s filled with a strange, misplaced sense of hope for reasons that he does not understand.

Ginny’s eyes search his, looking for something, and before Harry can find the words he wants to say, Ginny speaks, her voice breaking.

“Are you really Anakin? Not... _Vader?_ ”

“ _How do you know that name?”_ Harry says again, with new urgency. His sense of terror is rising, but so is the sense of hope. He’s almost dizzy with it.

Ginny lets out a little sobbing laugh.

“It was what my husband turned into,” she says, and Harry’s world comes to a standstill.

He’s oblivious to the Weasley boys throwing gnomes over the garden hedge; blind to everything but the pale girl in front of him, with the painfully-familiar eyes.

“ _Padme?”_

His voice emerges as a croak, and he doesn’t know what his face looks like, but hers fills with longing and hope and a desperate anguish.

“It’s really _you_ ,” she says, and stares at him, her expression full of emotion. Harry reaches for her hand, tentatively, terrified of rejection – but her hand curls around his own, and they sit there, looking at one another, Padme’s freckles standing out in sharp relief against the pallor of her face.

The moment hangs in the air, and neither of them are willing to break it, holding onto each other’s hand as though afraid to let go. Then a voice that sounds like Fred or George sings out, 

“Ginny and Harry sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G!”

The moment broken, they look up to see the twins grinning at them, and Ron staring like he doesn’t know what to make of the whole holding-hands thing.

Padme lets out an exasperated breath and says, “Shut _up_ ,” before standing, still holding onto Harry’s hand.

“Come on, let’s go upstairs and talk,” she says, and begins leading him inside.

“Harry?” Ron asks, alarmed, but Harry only shrugs helplessly at him, and follows Padme into the house.

They go into her bedroom and she shuts the door before sitting on her bed. Harry sits next to her.

“I’m so sorry,” is the first thing out of Harry’s mouth. “I’m so sorry, Padme. You have to believe me.”

Padme is staring at him. Finally she says,

“Tell me you didn’t stay by Palpatine’s side. Tell me I was right, and there was still good left in you.”

Harry nods, feels himself choke up.

“It was Luke. He found me, and in the end – he saved me.”

Padme’s face lights up with eagerness.

“Luke? Is he okay? And Leia?”

Harry’s stomach gives a funny little lurch.

“Leia?”

“Our daughter,” says Padme, looking confused that Harry doesn’t understand. “Luke’s sister. They were twins.”

“Leia? You named our daughter Leia?” Horror of immense magnitude is slowly unfolding in Harry’s brain, as his mind makes a terrible, horrible connection. “Not...” His mouth is dry. “Not Leia _Organa?_ ”

Padme reads the rising horror in his face, and blanches.

“Anakin, what did you _do?_ ”

“I didn’t know,” says Harry desperately. “Padme, I didn’t _know_ –”

Padme lets go of his hand and grabs him by his skinny shoulders, shaking him.

“What did you _do_ , Anakin?” she asks, and there is terror in her voice.

“I... I...” Anakin can’t get the words out. The horror and growing shame is almost too much to bear. But looking into Padme’s desperate face, he knows he can’t lie to her.

“She was part of the Rebellion,” he manages eventually. “Against Palpatine’s empire. I was... I... I interrogated her.” 

_ Tortured her _ , he doesn’t say, but he doesn’t need to. The implication is obvious.

Padme punches like a girl with six older brothers, and Harry falls off the bed and onto the floor. Somehow, face stinging, he finds the courage to look up.

Padme’s face is broken-hearted and furious, and any hopes Harry still has of earning her forgiveness wither and die on the spot.

“I never, _ever_ want to speak to you again,” says Padme, as Harry stares helplessly up at her. “Get out.”

Harry climbs to his feet, and backs away until he finds the door. He takes one last look at Padme’s face, before opening the door. As he leaves, he hears Padme begin to cry, in great, heaving sobs she’s clearly trying to suppress.

His face aching from the punch and his heart breaking all over again, Harry goes into Ron’s room, and shuts the door. He sits with his back to the door, and puts his head in his hands.

He sits there for a very long time. If he cries, there is no one around to know.

* * *

The Weasleys soon notice that Padme is angry with Harry. She doesn’t speak to him; whenever he enters a room, she gets up and leaves. The only time she’s willing to be in the same room is when they’re all sitting down to dinner, and even then, she doesn’t look at him, doesn’t acknowledge that he’s there in anyway whatsoever.

Harry feels like he’s in his own special kind of hell. Even Ron notices Harry’s crumpled expression every time he looks in Padme’s direction. Not to mention the bruise across his cheekbone.

“Cheer up, mate,” he offers, confused about why Harry cares about his sister’s evident ire, but sympathetic all the same. “I don’t know what you did, but she can’t stay mad forever. I mean, Fred and George once dyed her hair pink, and she forgave them eventually.”

Harry is not comforted. He knows that the Weasleys thinks this is some childish spat that will blow over, but it is the furthest thing from it. The Weasleys do not understand the horror of what he has done, and their ignorance is the only silver lining in the whole mess. If they knew what Harry has done – what he once was – he doubts that they would be willing to have him staying in their house.

Harry’s birthday comes and goes, the most miserable birthday he’s ever had in his life, even though Mrs Weasley makes him a cake and everything.

“Perhaps you could just... wish him a happy birthday?” Mrs Weasley suggests to Padme in an undertone, seeing Harry look sadly down at his cake.

“I really don’t think so,” Padme responds, her voice perfectly calm, and Mrs Weasley sighs, but doesn’t push it.

It is a long, painful summer, with Padme refusing even to acknowledge Harry’s existence. But eventually it comes to an end, and the Weasleys and Harry go shopping for school supplies at Diagon Alley.

Hermione meets them there, her parents following, and is visibly puzzled at Harry’s downcast mood.

“He’s been like this all summer,” Ron whispers in what he thinks is a quiet voice, but which Harry can actually hear quite clearly. “He had some kind of a row with Ginny. I think he has a crush on her, or something.”

Harry doesn’t bother to correct their misapprehensions. Besides, even if he did tell them that Padme is the love of his life, who’s going to believe him? He’s _twelve_. Instead, he slouches around after the Weasleys and the Grangers, his eyes on Padme, who never so much as looks back at him.

Then they arrive at Flourish and Blotts, where the author of this year’s Defense textbooks is signing books. He’s a celebrity of some note, Harry gathers, but he doesn’t particularly care one way or the other until Lockhart shouts for everyone to hear, “It _can’t_ be Harry Potter?”

The crowd parts around Harry, and Harry has just enough time to think _oh no_ , before Lockhart pulls him forward, to the front of the crowd. Everyone breaks into applause, and Harry pulls on his ‘dealing with reporters’ smile, even though inwardly he wants to grimace. He shakes hands with Lockhart for the benefit of the photographer, and edges away from the arm Lockhart has draped across his shoulders.

To Harry’s dismay, Lockhart announces that he’s going to be this year’s Defense professor at Hogwarts, and gives Harry his entire set of works for free. Harry’s smile this time really is more like a grimace as he thanks the man. Finally, he’s allowed to slip back into the crowd, staggering slightly under the weight of his new books.

“Bet you loved that, didn’t you, Potter?” an unwelcome voice calls out, and Harry closes his eyes for a moment. He doesn’t have the patience for Malfoy right now.

“ _Famous_ Harry Potter, can’t even go into a bookshop without making the front page.”

“You sound jealous,” a calm voice observes, and Harry’s eyes fly open in surprise. He stares at Padme, who is surveying Malfoy with a frown.

Malfoy flushes, and says, “Who are you, his _girlfriend?_ ” with a sneer.

Padme’s face goes hard, and Harry winces. Before Padme can say anything, Ron and Hermione fight their way through the crowd to Harry.

For a moment it looks like Ron and Malfoy are going to fight, and Harry prepares to break it up, but then Mr Weasley appears. Just as Harry starts to relax, a new voice drawls, “Well, well, well – _Arthur Weasley_.” 

It’s a man with a very strong resemblance to Malfoy – his father, Harry suspects.

Mr Weasley stiffens, and the pair exchange a few barbs, then Mr Malfoy picks up Padme’s second-hand transfiguration textbook and makes a comment about the Weasley’s economic status and the next thing Harry knows, the two supposedly grown wizards are having a brawl, right here in the bookstore. They don’t even bother to go for their wands.

Just for a second, Harry and Padme’s eyes accidentally meet. Padme looks just as exasperated as Harry feels.

Harry rolls his eyes to the ceiling, puts down his books, and makes a movement with both hands. Mr Weasley and Mr Malfoy go flying in opposite directions, and hang there, suspended in mid-air.

“ _Enough_ ,” Harry says in his Vader-voice. “Are you grown men, or children? Try to comport yourselves with a little dignity, _gentlemen_.” 

He waits a moment longer; Mr Malfoy looks furious and embarrassed, but Mr Weasley looks angry and a little ashamed of himself, so Harry lowers them both to the floor, ignoring the flash of the photographer’s camera going off. 

Mr Malfoy shoves Padme’s transfiguration book into her arms and stalks off like an affronted cat, his son following behind him. Mrs Weasley hurries up to scold her husband, while around them the crowd stares at Harry.

Padme is looking at Harry like she’s never seen him before, but when Harry looks back at her, she turns her head away, breaking eye contact.

Harry slumps, and follows the Weasleys and the Grangers out of the bookshop.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ETA: Quick poll: would Anakin-Harry fly the Weasleys' car to school, yes or no? I feel like a young Anakin, yes, absolutely would - but Harry, who has also been Vader for like twenty years? Does he have more self-control/common-sense than to fly a car to school? Please, let me know what you think in the comments! :)


	5. Luna Lovegood

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My current plans are to take this to the end of second year, then write a sequel which covers seventh year. No promises, though - my muse often deserts me.

** Chapter Five **  
** Luna Lovegood **

The next day, the _Daily Prophet_ ’s story about Lockhart’s book signing plays second-string to the piece on how the Boy-Who-Lived used _wandless magic_ to break up a fight in Flourish and Blotts. Above the article is a photograph of Harry, standing with his hands raised, a cold expression on his face. Harry can’t help but wonder if his face always looks like that, when he uses what he thinks of as his Vader-voice.

Aside from that, however, Harry rolls his eyes and shrugs it off. He’s not afraid to let people know about his abilities: if it makes them think twice before taking him on, then good. Harry knows that in this world, he is more vulnerable than he likes to be: but he’s not exactly _harmless_ , either. If people know that, then perhaps it will make him less of a target. To his knowledge, no one besides Voldemort has tried to come after him – so far, anyway. Harry wants to discourage anyone who has thoughts of avenging Voldemort’s defeat eleven years ago, or who might think of kidnapping as an easy way to make a galleon.

Either way, Harry’s not afraid: he was Anakin Skywalker, the Hero With No Fear, and then Darth Vader, and he knows a thing or two about handling himself – even if it’s in a scrawny child’s body. 

Speaking of which, Harry needs to do something about that. He’s filled out a bit, and shot up a couple of inches in the past year, now that he’s finally receiving enough food to sustain the growth of his young body. Harry knows that the body has priorities, and that in times of low food intake all nutrients are directed to maintaining essential functions. But when the body is being fed adequately, it’s possible to build up and train muscle. A healthy body is not necessary, to use the Force – but a fit and healthy Force-user is naturally going to have even faster reflexes and greater body strength than someone who has not trained their body to work with their Force abilities. The old Earth adage, ‘a healthy body is a healthy mind,’ is somewhat relevant here – using the Force may be to a large degree about mental control, but having a healthy body helps.

Harry knows that physically, he’s pretty pathetic. Small for his age, recovering from years of malnourishment, and with very little muscle, he knows it takes him much more effort to use the Force than it did when he was Anakin Skywalker; his lack of good physical health slows him down. But now that there’s something he can do about it, he probably should. Harry resolves that as soon as he returns to Hogwarts, he’s going to start up a physical training regime to get into shape. Harry isn’t looking forward to it, but however unpleasant it may be to begin with, getting into shape will make things much easier in the long run.

The night before he’s due to go back to Hogwarts, Harry feels restless and deeply sad. Part of the cause is upstairs in her bedroom, steadfastly ignoring his presence, but part of it is simply Harry’s own guilt and remorse. He has done terrible things, but he regrets nothing more than the terrible things he has done to his family. Somehow, miraculously, Luke forgave him, and thought Anakin worth saving regardless; but Harry doubts that Padme will ever forgive him... let alone his daughter.

Leia Organa. Honestly, Harry should have seen it. She was so like her mother in so many ways, believing in diplomatic solutions and the rights of the people... and yet in others, she was so like _him_ , or at least him when he was young and idealistic and hadn’t yet been entirely corrupted by Palpatine’s careful manipulations. 

He’d never seen it; neither her resemblance to Padme, nor her likeness to himself. He hadn’t wanted to, the observation being too painful to make: and now he had only himself to blame for the fact that he had tortured his daughter, the child he would have loved and cherished in another life. All he had seen was a thorn in the Emperor’s side, and he had taken steps to deal with it.

Honestly, though, the fact that the Alderaanian princess was named _Leia_ , a traditional Tatooinean name, should have been the biggest hint. But Harry had turned his back on his past so totally that by that point he didn’t see it even when it practically slapped him in the face.

Harry wants to tell his angel about Leia, about Luke – about the amazing human beings their children grew into. But he doesn’t quite dare. Padme is unequivocal in her attitude towards Harry, and after everything, Harry wants to respect her wishes. 

So instead of telling Padme about their children, Harry makes his way down to the garage, and Mr Weasley finds him there a little while before dinner. Harry has the bonnet of the car propped open and is peering at the engine, but looks up when Mr Weasley clears his throat.

“Sorry,” Harry says, before Mr Weasley can say anything. “I have an interest in mechanics.”

Mr Weasley’s eyes light up. 

“You understand how automobiles work, then?” he asks, looking interested.

“A little,” Harry demurs, because although he’s taken a look at the manual for Vernon’s car in the past, Vernon has never actually let him near the real thing. “I’m not an expert when it comes to cars. Although I repaired Uncle Vernon’s lawn mower whenever it broke down, and I took apart Dudley’s old radio and put it back together so it worked properly again. Before the holidays I was trying to work out how mechanics and magic work together – there’s an old wizarding wireless set one of the fifth years let me have because it was broken, and I’ve been trying to get it working again. The enchantments have faded, I think.”

Despite Harry’s disavowal of expertise when it comes to cars, Mr Weasley still has that gleam in his eyes.

“Why don’t I take you over how she works?” he suggests, gesturing to the car. “Not many wizards have an interest in melding magic and mechanics, and an automobile is much more tricky than a wireless, of course – but you might find it useful to know, for the future.”

In the end, Percy is sent to bring them in to dinner, and Harry arrives in the kitchen covered with oil, but feeling a little better than he did before.

“Harry dear, whatever have you been doing?” Mrs Weasley exclaims.

“Tinkering with the car,” Harry says.

Padme looks up from her dinner at that, and darts a complicated glance at him, but looks back down again before Harry can respond in any way.

“It’s alright Molly, I was supervising him the whole time,” says Mr Weasley quickly. “It turns out Harry has an interest in combining muggle mechanics with magic.”

Mr Weasley sounds so pleased that either Fred or George says, “Keep up the good work, Harry, and you’ll be adopted in no time.”

“ _Fred_ ,” says Mrs Weasley dangerously, but she goes a little pink, like Fred’s hit closer to the truth than he knows.

“Nah,” says the other twin – George. “That’s the last thing he wants, because then he wouldn’t be able to marry Ginny.”

Padme puts down her fork. Harry suppresses the urge to hide under the table.

“I have absolutely _no_ desire to marry Harry, and I’ll thank you not to bring it up again,” she says, her voice filled with cold dignity.

“Come on, Gin-Gin, don’t you think you’re being a little hard on the poor boy?” says Fred, grinning. “What’d he do, try for a snog, or something?”

Padme shoots her brother a look so full of fury that even his grin falters.

“What he did is none of your business. If you’ll excuse me, I believe I’ve had enough dinner.” Padme stands up and leaves the table with queenly grace, before leaving the room altogether.

There is an awkward silence. Mr and Mrs Weasley look at each other.

Harry doesn’t expect the twins to corner him later that evening. When he emerges from the bathroom, the twins are there, blocking the corridor.

“So, Harry,” one of them says, faux-casual, “what _did_ you do to Ginny?”

“I’m sure you’re a stand-up bloke and all, being the Boy-Who-Lived, says the other twin, his tone a little more biting, “but given the way Ginny’s been behaving, well...”

“...a bloke can’t help but wonder,” the first twin finishes.

Harry looks between them. 

“Ginny would kill you if she knew you were interfering,” he says, because he knows Padme well enough to know that much.

“Eh, what Ginny doesn’t know won’t hurt her,” says Twin One.

“It might hurt you, on the other hand,” Twin Two adds.

Harry folds his arms and does his best to look forbidding.

“I didn’t do anything to Ginny,” he says, and it’s not a _lie_ , exactly – but Harry feels uncomfortable with the statement, all the same.

“It doesn’t seem like it.”

“Are you two actually trying to threaten me?” asks Harry. “Not afraid I’m going to use my ‘wandless magic’ on you, then?” 

Both twins grin an identical grin. It’s not an entirely pleasant expression.

“Harry, Harry, Harry–”

“Imagine the look on Ginny’s face if you used your wandless magic on us. I don’t think you want to do that, do you?”

“I don’t know,” Harry draws his words out thoughtfully, “I’m pretty sure she’d understand if I left you both stranded up a tree, or stuck in the chimney... something nice and impermanent... after all, she wasn’t exactly happy with you, earlier...”

The twins look at him, exchanging a quick glance, clearly trying to gauge whether Harry means what he’s saying. 

“Look,” says Twin Two. “We just want to make sure you know that Ginny has our protection.”

Harry looks at them, and reminds himself that Padme is their little sister, and that they’re doing this out of a place of concern. He unbends a little.

“I would rather die than hurt your sister,” he says earnestly. “I would do anything she asked of me. _Anything_.”

Maybe he comes off a little _too_ earnest, because the twins’ eyebrows rise simultaneously.

“Okay,” says Twin One. “Well. That’s...”

“Disturbing,” Twin Two says.

“I was going to say ‘illuminating,’ brother mine, but ‘disturbing’ works, too.”

Harry takes off his glasses and rubs a hand over his face. He understands that his relationship with Padme must look bewildering to outsiders, but there’s no way that he can explain what’s actually going on.

Not that he wants to.

Twin One claps him on the back and says, “Well, I can’t say I understand your obsession with our little sister–”

Harry opens his mouth to object to the word ‘ _obsession_ ,’ but is interrupted by Twin Two.

“But as long as you respect her wishes, I don’t see why you can’t continue your faithful swain routine – from a distance, mind.”

“It’s not as though she wants me to get any closer,” says Harry, and somehow, he keeps the bitterness out of his voice.

“Alright, good, glad we had this little chat,” says Twin Two, and just like that, Fred and George, whichever one is which, disappear back down the hallway.

Harry sighs, and goes to Ron’s room (where he’s been sleeping on an old mattress) to get ready for bed.

They’re going to be up early tomorrow, and he’s going to need all the sleep he can manage.

* * *

In spite of everything, Harry is glad to be returning to Hogwarts. It’s become more of a home to him that the Dursleys’ ever was; and while he likes living at the Burrow very much, Mr and Mrs Weasley treat him more like an honoured guest than one of their own. 

That’s fine: Harry doesn’t expect anything else. But being surrounded by such positive family life without actually being part of it makes him feel his lack of real family all the more keenly than before. He doesn’t count the Dursleys as family: he knows that they definitely do not consider him to be such. To them, he’s a waste of space whose usefulness is always outweighed by the irritation he causes simply by existing – a constant reminder of magic and ‘the unnatural.’ 

Being around the Weasleys makes Harry wish that his own parents weren’t dead, so that he could share in that easy, fondly exasperated camaraderie, that presumption of being wanted and loved even when at  your most irritating. Ron, Harry thinks, doesn’t know how lucky he is, instead complaining of how annoying the twins are or of his least-favourite dish being served for dinner. So yes, Harry is glad to be returning to Hogwarts, where whatever else happens, at least he _belongs_.

But something goes wrong at platform nine and three quarters, and the barrier between the muggle and magical parts of King’s Cross station refuses to let them through.

“Harry,” Ron says suddenly, his eyes gleaming. “The _car!_ ”

Harry knows immediately that this is a bad idea.

“No, Ron, let’s wait for someone to come looking for us–”

“But don’t you see, Harry? We can fly the car to Hogwarts!” 

Harry falters at the word ‘fly.’

“Wait, your Dad’s car _flies?_ ” 

Mr Weasley hadn’t mentioned that.

“Sure. Fred and George have borrowed it half a dozen times, they say it’s a bit more difficult than flying a broom, but it’s not that hard. Besides, there’s not much to run into, once you’re up in the air – just the occasional bird, and I’m sure we could avoid those.”

It’s still a bad idea, but Harry’s resolve is faltering. Flying an enchanted car can’t be that different from flying a speeder, can it? 

“No, Ron,” Harry says again, without much conviction. “Imagine Professor McGonagall’s face if we turn up to Hogwarts in a flying car.”

“But Harry–”

Harry puts his hands over his ears to avoid further temptation. He kind of wants to fly the car, but if they’re seen, they’ll break the International Statue of Secrecy, the wizards’ most important law, and the last thing Harry wants is the full might of national and international law crashing down on him. And after being Vader for twenty-two years, under Palpatine’s control, he has practice at denying himself things he wants.

“Fine, I’ll fly it _myself_ , then,” Ron says, disgruntled, and begins pulling his trunk back the way they’d come, towards where the car was parked.

Harry groans, and reels Ron back in with the Force.

“Hey!” Ron says indignantly as he’s dragged back towards Harry.

“Ron, if you fly the car, you will get yourself killed,” Harry tells him seriously. “Either because you’ve flown it into something, or because your mother kills you when she gets back and find the car gone.”

Ron pales, like he hadn’t considered Mrs Weasley.

“We’ll go back to the car and wait. Someone will come looking for us sooner or later.”

It’s half an hour of waiting back at the car before a frantic Mrs and Mr Weasley show up. Both of them, it seems, had tried to get back through the barrier to find why Ron and Harry hadn’t joined them on the platform, only to find the barrier solid and unyielding. They were joined by other people trying to get back to the muggle part of the station. Finally the barrier had gone back to being insubstantial again, and allowed everyone through.

“We’ll have to Floo Hogwarts, tell them what’s happened,” says Mrs Weasley. “The train must have been gone a good twenty minutes, now.”

They drive back to the Burrow, and Harry and Ron wait around with their things in the living room as Mr Weasley makes a Floo call to Professor McGonagall. When he pulls his head out of the fire he says, “Right, boys, you just go through with your trunks.”

So Harry steps into the fire with a shout of “Hogwarts, Deputy Headmistress’ office,” and falls out into a large, old-fashioned looking office, landing on the rug before the fireplace, his luggage next to him. He scrambles to his feet, and sees Professor McGonagall looking down at him. Ron comes through the fireplace a second later, and almost bowls Harry over by accident.

“This is all most irregular,” says Professor McGonagall. “However, it cannot be helped. The two of you will wait here under my supervision until it is time for the feast. You will sit quietly, as I have a great deal of work to do. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Professor,” Harry and Ron chorus, but Harry adds, “Can I get out a book from my trunk?”

Professor McGonagall gives him permission, and Harry pulls out one of his new textbooks to read. Ron looks glum at the thought of doing nothing but reading for the next few hours, but pulls out his battered copy of _Quidditch Through the Ages_ to read.

After a couple of hours, both boys’ stomachs are rumbling. Professor McGonagall looks up from her paperwork, and glances at Harry and Ron.

“I think a spot of afternoon tea would not go amiss,” she says, and calls for a house elf. The elf appears from nowhere and Ron yelps in surprise. Professor McGongall asks for a plate of scones for Harry and Ron and a cup of tea for herself, and the elf bounced on the spot, nodding eagerly, before disappearing again. A couple of minutes later, a tray of food appears on the edge of Professor McGonagall’s neat and tidy desk.

Harry and Ron do their best to eat the scones without dropping crumbs all over the carpet, but only partially succeed. Afterwards, Ron looks a little happier as he goes back to his book.

Harry finishes reading his second-year transfiguration textbook and moves on to his charms textbook.

Hours later, when Harry’s muscles are protesting from having been sitting for so long, Professor McGonagall glances at the clock on the wall and says, “I believe it is time for us to go down to the Great Hall. Leave your luggage here, and the house elves will place it in your dormitories. You might want to put your books away, however.”

Ron looks tremendously relieved. 

They walk down to the Great Hall. Most of the teachers are already there, sitting at the head table. Harry and Ron move to sit at the Gryffindor table. 

Ten minutes later, the rest of the students pour into the hall, and the school year officially begins.

* * *

It’s shaping up to be a long year. 

Padme still isn’t speaking to him. Harry tries to stop thinking of her as Padme, and to think of her as Ginny instead; he attempts to remind himself that she’s a different person, now. It should be easy, but it isn’t. Every time he looks at her, he sees not an eleven year old girl but the wife he lost, long ago. He wants desperately to talk to her – to apologise, to share stories of their children – but instead he keeps his distance. It’s difficult, but Harry reminds himself that he has _earned_ this. He has no right to anything where Padme is concerned.

Aside from his ongoing guilt about Padme and Leia, however, the year seems to be starting off well. True, there’s Snape as always, and Lockhart, who’s an incompetent buffoon, but those two are minor annoyances, in the scheme of things.

There’s a tiny first-year boy who keeps following Harry around, trying to take photographs. Harry can’t remember ever being that young and innocent, even when he was eleven the first time around. But little Colin Creevey stumbles cheerfully around with his camera, wide-eyed with wonder everywhere he goes, and something in that innocent gaze stops Harry from simply telling the boy off.

“Colin,” he finally says, and sees Colin vibrate from excitement at the fact that _the_ Harry Potter knows his name. Harry stifles a sigh. “You can’t go taking photographs of people without their permission, do you understand?”

Colin looks up at him, puzzled.

“Look, people don’t like being photographed like they’re exhibits in a museum or animals at the zoo. It’s disrespectful,” says Harry, who has quashed the urge to crush Colin’s ever-present camera more than once. “You need to ask if people want to be photographed, and if they say no, then you _don’t photograph them_.”

“But–” Colin begins.

“No, Colin,” Harry says, with sudden authority. “The way you take photographs of everyone without their permission all the time is making people angry, and if you’re not careful, sooner or later someone’s going to hex you and shove that camera of yours down the nearest toilet.” 

Colin’s face falls, and Harry puts a hand on his shoulder.

“I know that the magical world is amazing,” he says. “Believe me. But you have to treat people with respect.”

Colin looks up at him, looking disconsolate.

“I – I guess,” the younger boy says, and Harry nods, and leaves it there. 

But Colin seems to absorb the message of Harry’s little talk, because after that Colin always carefully asks, “Harry, can I have a picture?” or “Harry, do you mind if I...?” and waits for Harry’s consent to be given before the flash goes off. Harry doesn’t always give his permission, of course; but when he does, Colin beams like someone’s just handed him the world. 

It seems like this year is going to be less eventful than last year, but then, as in Harry’s first year, trouble strikes at Halloween.

Filch’s cat is found stiff and immobile, hanging from a torch bracket. Her eyes are blank and staring almost accusingly.

Harry spends the evening at the Halloween feast, and so discovers the grisly sight with everyone else as they pour out of the Great Hall and down the corridors. Above Filch’s cat is a message, painted in shimmering foot-high letters, and when Harry sees it any emotion he has resembling cheerfulness vanishes instantly.

_ ‘THE CHAMBER OF SECRETS HAS BEEN OPENED. ENEMIES OF THE HEIR BEWARE.’ _

Harry stares up at the message, and knows in his bones that whomever left the message isn’t going to stop here.

“Enemies of the Heir beware! You’ll be next, mudbloods!” a voice shouts, exultant, and amid the resulting gasps Harry grits his teeth at the reminder that Malfoy exists. He turns on his heel, his expression sharp enough to cut glass, and Malfoy takes a step backward as Harry looks at him.

“What did you just say?” Harry demands.

He doesn’t know exactly what ‘mudblood’ means, but he can guess, and judging by the reactions of the students around them, it is _not_ a word one uses in polite company.

But Malfoy’s eyes are glittering, his face flushed.

“You heard me, Potter! Better watch out... I’m sure you’re somewhere on the Heir’s list...”

Malfoy’s smug satisfaction rubs Harry the wrong way.

He grabs the front of Malfoy’s robes and hauls him in, eye-to-eye, with Force-enhanced strength.

“Be very careful what you say,” Harry warns, his words full of unspoken threats, and lets Malfoy go just as the first of the teachers rounds the corner into the corridor.

Filch has gone to pieces, screaming at the students in between loud sobs, and Harry and the other children are sent back to their common rooms while one of the professors goes to alert the headmaster.

Over the next few days the school talks of little else but the attack. For once, Harry pays close attentions to the conversations around him, sifting rumour from fact as best he can, trying to discover what the Chamber of Secrets is and who the mysterious ‘Heir’ might be.

It’s Hermione who prompts Professor Binns to recount the story of the Chamber of Secrets. According to legend, when Slytherin fell out with the other founders and left the school he left behind a secret chamber which housed some unknown horror, which could be used by his heir to purge the school of all those he considered ‘unworthy’ of learning magic – in other words, the muggle-born and ‘half-blood’ witches and wizards. The monster, whatever it is, supposedly can be controlled only by the Heir of Slytherin.

It’s a disturbing tale, and Harry is not reassured by Binns’ vehement declaration that the Chamber of Secrets is a myth, not fact. It almost doesn’t matter whether the Chamber of Secrets is real: _someone_ is using it to incite fear, and hatred.

But if it _is_ real... then there could be far, far worse ahead than a petrified cat.

Aside from Harry, probably the only student who isn’t panicking over recent events is Padme; half the students are carrying good luck charms with them, most of them objects of dubious provenance sold by one of the more enterprising sixth-year boys. But Padme is as composed as ever: Harry, watching her from a distance, thinks that she looks worried, but is determined to act with dignity instead of allowing herself to become overwhelmed by the panic or suspicion the other students have been displaying.

Wishing that he could speak to her, Harry leaves breakfast abruptly and without eating anything, and goes to sit on the steps leading to the massive front doors of the castle.

It’s there that the blonde girl finds him.

“Sandwich?” a voice asks, and Harry looks around to see a small blonde girl wearing radish earrings standing next to him, holding a plate of sandwiches. Her uniform is askew, and her eyes are unusually wide, as though she is perpetually surprised by everything; but there is no malice in her curious gaze, and no ill-intention that Harry can sense in the Force.

“They’re ham sandwiches, if that helps,” the girl adds, when Harry only stares at her. She sits down beside him, resting the plate of sandwiches on her lap.

“What are you doing here?” Harry asks, because strangers usually only approach him because they want his autograph or something. They don’t offer him sandwiches.

“I saw you looking at Ginny,” the girl explains, and begins eating one of the sandwiches. Harry takes one, but doesn’t eat it yet, waiting for the girl’s answer. “She’s ever so conflicted, you know. I know she misses you.”

“What do you know about it?” Harry asks, his gaze suddenly intent.

The girl shrugs.

“Not as much as you do, I’m sure, but Ginny has told me a little. She asked me if I believed in past lives, and when I said that I had no reason not to, she said that the two of you had been married, once, in a past life.”

“Is that all she told you?” Harry asks, with sudden dread.

“Oh, no. She also said that you were a Dark Lord who did terrible things,” the girl says placidly, and Harry flinches. “But you seem to have gotten past that, and you looked so very sad, just now, so I decided to bring you some sandwiches. It’s not healthy to skip breakfast. It’s the most important meal of the day.”

She looks pointedly at Harry’s sandwich. Under the weight of her expectation, somehow Harry finds himself taking a bite. The sandwich is, indeed, a ham sandwich. He chews, and swallows.

He considers what to say, to this little girl who has confronted him without an ounce of fear, even though, as far as he can tell, she has believed everything Padme has said.

“What’s your name?” he finally asks.

“Oh, I’m Luna Lovegood,” the blonde girl says. “And you’re Harry Potter, I know. Is it true that you can do wandless magic?”

“No,” says Harry. “I use... something else.”

Luna nods, and reaches for another sandwich.

“You don’t seem disturbed to discover that I used to be a Dark Lord.”

“Well, you’re not a Dark Lord anymore, are you?” Luna asks reasonably. “You seem perfectly nice to me. Some people aren’t. My classmates call me ‘Loony’ Lovegood,” she confides.

Harry frowns.

“That’s unkind.”

Luna shrugs again.

“Mummy always used to say that people can be very unkind to people they don’t understand. She was very wise,” Luna says, an air of deep sadness falling over her – and in that instant, Harry knows that her mother is gone. 

“I’m sorry for your loss,” he says. “I understand what it’s like to lose people you love.”

Luna eyes him.

“You do, don’t you?” she says, and hands him a second sandwich. “Is that why you were looking at Ginny like that?”

Harry doesn’t know what to say. He nods, and decides to be honest.

“There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for her,” he says, and that is still as terribly true as it ever was. “I’d do anything she asked of me. But all she’s asked is for me to stay away from her.”

“It’s nice of you to listen,” says Luna. “But she doesn’t completely mean it. She misses you as much as you miss her, even if she’s not ready to admit it, yet.”

Harry feels his heart lift a little at her matter-of-fact honesty. There is no guile in those big eyes, no falsehood that he can detect in the Force.

“I hurt our children,” he says. “She will never forgive me for that, any more than I can forgive myself.”

Luna pats his arm.

“We must seek forgiveness from ourselves before we can expect it from others,” she says sagely, before adding, “That life is gone, Harry. Why aren’t you letting it go?”

Harry huffs out a wry laugh, remembering the last time someone advised him to let go of what mattered to him.

“I’m not very good at letting go,” he tells Luna. “And I – I have a lot to make up for.”

Luna accepts this.

“As long as you remember that, and don’t hold on just for the sake of holding on,” she says. “That does no one any good.”

Luna eats the last sandwich while Harry is contemplating her words, and stands up.

“It was nice to meet you, Harry Potter,” she says, “but class starts in ten minutes, so I should go.”

“Luna?” Harry says, as she turns; she looks back at him curiously. 

“Thank you,” he says, and Luna smiles brightly at him.

“You’re welcome,” she says, and disappears back through the castle doors.


	6. The House Elves

** Chapter Six **   
** The House Elves **

Two days later, Colin Creevey is petrified.

If the school was frightened before, now they’re _really_ panicking. Despite the fact that so far there have been no fatalities of any kind, the non-purebood students are convinced that it’s only a matter of time. The teachers are just as concerned: students are no longer allowed to go anywhere alone, and must travel in groups, escorted by the prefects. The school is simmering with tension, and Harry is worried that sooner or later it’s going to boil over.

Ron is convinced that Malfoy is the Heir of Slytherin, and Hermione is willing to be convinced. Harry isn’t.

“He’s a nasty little piece of work,” Harry says, “but I’m not convinced it’s him. He doesn’t have the stomach or the initiative for this sort of thing. Besides, if he was the Heir of Slytherin, don’t you think he’d have bragged about it already?”

Harry flatly vetoes Hermione’s suggestion of brewing Polyjuice Potion to secretly interrogate Malfoy, and he and Hermione keep digging for information.

Harry wakes late one morning to enormous eyes staring at him. For a moment he almost acts on deadly instinct, before he realises that it’s Dobby the house-elf. 

The elf is reproachful that Harry has returned to Hogwarts, despite the fact that Dobby blocked the barrier at platform nine and three quarters to prevent Harry from getting through to the train.

Harry stares at Dobby. It is evident that the house-elf has quite different thought-processes from Harry, and Harry tries to think of an argument that might persuade Dobby to leave him alone. So far Dobby’s powers have proven to be unpredictable, and Harry would rather not alienate the small being, but he doesn’t want Dobby creating any more problems, either.

“Dobby, if I leave Hogwarts, they won’t let me be a wizard any longer,” he says. “They’ll snap my wand and make me live as a muggle, and then if anyone tried to hurt me because I defeated the Dark Lord, I’d be defenceless.”

“But Harry Potter is using wandless magic!” Dobby says. “Dobby knows. Dobby’s master was talking about it. Very angry, he was being.”

“It’s not wandless magic, “Harry says, with a sigh. “It’s a different kind of power, and it has its limitations. Besides, Dobby, I’m only twelve. I don’t know nearly as much magic as an adult wizard, and I need to learn if I’m to stay safe.”

Dobby looks convinced. Harry sighs, and leans forward.

“Voldemort –” Dobby lets out a frightened squeak, “–isn’t gone, Dobby. Someday he might come after me again, and I need to be able to defend myself.”

“But Harry Potter sir is in great danger!”

“So is everyone in this castle who isn’t a pureblood,” says Harry, rather grimly. “I can’t just leave them to face the Heir of Slytherin alone, Dobby. And there are people here who I need to protect.”

“Harry Potter is so noble, so valiant!” says Dobby. “But he must not risk his life for his friends. He must–”

“ _Dobby_ ,” says Harry. “What if Voldemort rises again, and I am the only one who can stop him?”

Dobby stares at Harry. His ears droop.

“But Harry Potter should not have to – he is only a boy–”

“No, I’m not,” says Harry. “I’m more than that. I’m a symbol of hope. What happens if that symbol disappears? What kind of hero would I be, if I left people to suffer and die?”

Dobby bursts into tears.

“Dobby does not want Harry Potter to be hurt!” he wails.

“Sometimes,” Harry says, “getting hurt is the better option, Dobby. All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to stand by and let it happen. I refuse to be the man who lets it happen.”

Harry has already done worse than that, in a previous life. This time, he’s going to be on the right side. He’s seen the worst of the darkness – has _been_ the darkness – and he knows in his heart that he can weather whatever terrible things might be coming.

He has to, or what’s the use in his being reborn?

Dobby looks at Harry for a long moment, still crying. Then:

“Dobby sees that he cannot change Harry Potter’s mind,” the house elf says, very sadly. “Dobby wishes him all the best against the Heir of Slytherin, and hopes very much that he does not die.”

“Thank you,” Harry says, and before Dobby can pop out of existence again, asks quickly, “Do you mind if I ask you a question?”

“Dobby doesn’t mind.”

“I asked Ron about house elves, and he said that you’re basically a class of magical servants. But... you spoke of your _master_ , before...”

”House elves are not paid, Harry Potter,” says Dobby, still sniffling. “We are not being given holidays, or weekends off. We are expected to work and work until we die, and we are depending on the kindness of our masters. Dobby’s masters, sir, they are not kind. They punish Dobby often, and promise to kill Dobby several times a day.”

Harry feels the beginning of wrath rising in him.

“So what you really are,” he says slowly, and he can’t help but think of his childhood as Anakin, “is slaves.”

Dobby nods.

“Most house elves like to serve,” he says. “We are wanting a large family to love and take care of, and the magic of our wizards helps us live. But some masters are taking advantage of this, and treating us cruelly. The other wizards do not care.”

“Dobby,” says Harry, “do _you_ wish you were free?”

Dobby hesitates on the edge of a ‘ _yes_ ,’ before trying to brain himself on the bed-post.

“Dobby is a bad elf!” he says, over and over, and Harry has to physically pull him away from the bed-post to stop him from injuring himself.

“Dobby, you’re not a bad house-elf,” Harrys says firmly. “If your _master_ ,” and the word sounds ugly in his mouth, “is treating you badly, then they don’t deserve your loyalty.”

Dobby starts to cry again.

“Truly Harry Potter is kind and noble! Dobby wishes he was not bound to his masters’ orders, so that he could assist Harry Potter in vanquishing the evil which lurks at Hogwarts!”

It takes a good ten minutes before Dobby is calm enough to pop away. Harry parts his bed curtains, to see if anyone overheard their conversation, but he’s the only one still in the dormitory.

There is a terrible fire burning in his heart, at the revelation that the wizarding world uses _slaves_ – and apparently, thinks nothing of it. Perhaps the house elves need the magic of the people they are bound to – but that is no excuse for _slavery_. 

He goes to breakfast still in a rage, and people scatter in his wake.

Hermione timidly asks what’s wrong.

“Did you know,” Harry says loudly, “that the wizarding world uses _slaves?_ ”

People turn to look at him, and further down the table he sees Padme’s head lift. He’s too angry to care that she’s listening to what he has to say.

“What do you mean?” Hermione asks.

“House elves, Hermione. _House elves_. A race of beings magically bound to serve witches and wizards. They aren’t paid, they don’t get holidays, and there is absolutely nothing to stop their _masters_ from abusing them.”

Several people look bemused, including Ron. Hermione looks horrified.

Padme, further down the table, is the only one to understand Harry’s fury. She looks stricken.

“But Harry, house elves like working,” Ron points out.

“ _That doesn’t make it any better!”_ Harry roars as he leaps to his feet, and heads turn all over the Great Hall, even at the teacher’s table. 

Harry takes a deep breath, and stops shouting, but his words are still loud and angry.

“I thought this world was _better_ than that,” he says, and feels the bitterness rising at his own naiveté – a word he wouldn’t normally apply to himself, but what other word is there to describe his belief that this was a world without slaves? “Oh, I knew that there were bigots and Dark Lords, but you get that in every society – not everyone is a good person, and the ambitious and power-hungry exist everywhere. But to have an entire slave class which witches and wizards are free to treat badly, and no one in this world thinks there’s _anything wrong with that?_ What kind of world _is_ this?”

“Most people don’t treat their house-elves badly,” says a fourth-year girl, and Harry whirls on her.

“ _That’s not the point!_ Why aren’t there laws in place to protect them? Members of the Ministry assigned to inspect households with house-elves to make sure that they’re properly treated? Why aren’t there agencies devoted to the welfare of house-elves? Concerned citizens reporting the abuse of house-elves to the Ministry? Why isn’t there an arrangement _besides slavery_ which allows the house-elves to work for witches and wizards and benefit from their magic?”

The tableware rattles. People start backing away from the Gryffindor table. Harry doesn’t stop.

“Is this world so concerned with their own lives, so lost in apathy that they would allow an entire race of beings to be treated this way?” 

Harry looks around, waiting to see if anyone answers him. There is silence, and people avoid his eyes. The teachers over at the head table are staring at him as though they’re too stunned by his outburst to stop him. 

Harry, angrier than ever, has one last thing to say in response to everyone’s reactions.

“No wonder Voldemort found it so easy to take power,” he says, and there are audible gasps. “You’re all so preoccupied by yourselves that you don’t care about the fate of anyone else.” He shakes his head. “I’m disgusted by the entire wizarding world,” he says, and before anyone can recover from their stunned silence, Harry turns on his heel and stalks from the Great Hall.

He doesn’t stop moving until he’s out by the lake, at which point he sits down on the grass, crosses his legs, and descends into the state of meditation he badly needs.

Emotion, he thinks, is not inherently a bad thing – but when Harry is as angry as he is right now, he needs to channel that rage and fury, contain it, so that it does not find an inappropriate outlet.

He doesn’t know how long he sits there, before he feels the presence approaching. He opens his eyes and turns his head. It’s Hermione, carrying a plate of scones. She looks torn between nervousness and anger as she joins Harry on the grass.

Harry gives her a bitter smile.

“I’m not sorry about what I said,” he says, “but it occurs to me that I could have handled that better.”

“I don’t know,” says Hermione. “I think you gave them something to think about. Slavery, _honestly_ – I thought this world was better than that, too.”

Harry gives a low laugh, and shakes his head.

“The more things change, the more they stay the same,” he mutters to himself.

Hermione takes a deep breath, and broaches the subject cautiously.

“I understand why discovering slavery would make anyone angry, but Harry... you seemed to take it personally.”

For a long moment there’s silence. Harry can’t tell her about Anakin, and his childhood, so he stretches the truth a little.

“I’ve never had a happy childhood, Hermione. My relatives... they never treated me well. Almost like a slave.”

Hermione’s eyes widen, and she looks horrified again. She puts a hand on Harry’s arm.

“Is that... is that why you stayed with the Weasleys all summer?” she asks, putting two and two together with impressive swiftness. “Ginny said that you just showed up one day, and stayed with them for the rest of the holidays.”

“You talk to Ginny?”

“She’s far more sensible than the Gryffindor girls in our year,” Hermione says. “She wanted to ask me about some of the first-year work, because Ron said I was the top of our class,” and Hermione preens a bit at that, “and we began talking about other things. I suppose I’d call her a friend – although not like you and Ron, of course.”

“Oh,” says Harry. 

“You don’t mind, do you?” Hermione asks, biting her lip.

“Hermione, Ginny is a wonderful person, and you’re privileged to be her friend.”

“But you’re not jealous?” Hermione persists.

“No, not jealous,” says Harry honestly. He can’t begrudge Hermione her new friendship; in other circumstances, he’d be delighted that she and Padme were getting along. “Just...”

“Sad?” Hermione asks, her expression perceptive, and Harry nods.

They sit in silence for a while.

“Well,” Hermione says briskly, breaking the silence, “About the house-elf issue, our first order of business is to free them, obviously –”

But Harry shakes his head.

“Without figuring out an alternative arrangement? House-elves get benefits from their relationship with witches and wizards, Hermione. We need to find a way to replicate those benefits without the down-sides of slavery. A house-elf told me that the magic of their masters helps them live, and most of them like having a family to love and care for. We can’t take that away from them. Somehow, we need to fix the relationship between wizards and house-elves. We can’t just free them without taking their current needs into consideration – that would just leave them even worse off.”

Hermione stares at him.

“You sound like you’ve given this a lot of thought,” she says.

Harry shrugs, and doesn’t tell her that in another life, he was intimately acquainted with the politics of slavery, nor that he spent a lot of time, once, trying to figure out how to free his people – before the Jedi convinced him to turn his back on his roots, to try and forget that he had been a slave. He understands that to _truly_ free people, you need to ensure that there are ways to meet their needs once they are freed, or else all you’re doing is introducing them to a new kind of hell that’s hardly an improvement on the old one.

Harry doesn’t know how to solve the house elf slavery problem. But he’s only twelve. He has time.

“We’re twelve, Hermione,” he says. “We have time to figure it out.”

Hermione pats his shoulder.

“We will,” she promises, and without either of them saying a word, they make a pact to end slavery in the wizarding world once and for all.

* * *

With Colin petrified and the school in a state of high tension, the teachers come up with the idea of beginning a duelling club. Most of the students are reassured by the idea of learning to defend themselves. The duelling club is more for the benefit of the younger years, as the older students mostly know how to duel already, but some of them attend the first session anyway.

Harry tags along with Ron and Hermione, who are eager to learn how to duel. Harry isn’t sure what to think of a society which teaches children to use a weapon so young – and yes, he’s well-aware of the irony of a former Jedi thinking that – but he admits that the wizarding world seems far more dangerous than the muggle world, from his limited experience with both.

To Harry’s irritated amusement, it turns out that the duelling club is being taught by Professors Lockhart and Snape. He isn’t sure who is worse, but decides that it’s probably Lockhart: at least Professor Snape is likely to teach them something useful, even if it involves actively being cursed in the process.

Professor Lockhart and Professor Snape decide to demonstrate the use of the disarming charm during a duel. Harry isn’t surprised at all when Lockhart is blasted off his feet. Hermione looks anxious, dancing on tip-toes, audibly wondering if the Defence professor will be okay.

But Professor Lockhart is only a little the worse for wear. He breaks the students up into pairs, to practice disarming one another. Professor Snape pairs Malfoy with Harry. Instead of waiting to the count of three, Malfoy shoots a spell at Harry on two: Harry dodges a second before he sees the spell coming, and neatly disarms his opponent before Malfoy realises what is happening.

The practice duels between the other students aren’t going much better, and Lockhart decides that perhaps, instead of beginning with an offensive approach, it would be better if the students learned to _block_ unfriendly spells, first.

Harry and Malfoy are picked as volunteers, and get up onto the low stage, where everyone can see them. Lockhart attempts to show Harry how to block malevolent spells, but drops his wand instead. Harry braces himself.

But instead of trying to disarm him, Malfoy shouts “ _Serpensortia!_ ” and a snake comes out of the end of his wand. The crowd around the stage screams, and scramble to back away.

Harry looks down at the snake. He’s talked to snakes, in the past: little grass snakes in the Dursleys’ garden, who quickly slithered out of his way. This snake is different. Harry strongly suspects that he’s looking at an adder. The snake is dark, with a blunt head, and a long, sinuous body. As Harry watches, it raises its head ready to strike. Harry immerses himself in the Force.

“Don’t move, Potter,” says Professor Snape, clearly enjoying the sight of Harry in this dangerous situation. “I’ll get rid of it...”

“Allow me!” Professor Lockhart brandishes his wand. There is a loud bang, and the snake flies up in the air. When it comes down again, it darts towards the edge of the stage, fangs exposed, straight towards Justin Finch-Fletchley.

Harry clenches his fist, and the snake falls down dead as its skull is crushed in an invisible grip. It takes the frightened crowd a moment to notice that the snake isn’t moving, too busy screaming and trying to get away.

Harry looks back at Professor Snape, whose gaze transfers to from the dead snake to Harry, his gaze unexpectedly calculating.

“Maybe a little faster, next time, Professor,” Harry suggests dryly, and receives a glare in return. 

People are staring at him, cottoning-on to the fact that it was Harry who killed the snake, without even the use of his wand. Murmurs are starting up, and there’s some fearful looks being sent in Harry’s direction.

Ignoring this, Harry approaches Justin.

“You all right?” he asks the other boy. Justin gives him a wide-eyed look.

“Yeah, Potter. Thanks.”

“You’re welcome,” says Harry. 

The duelling club ends shortly afterwards, without anyone really having learned anything.

The next day, Justin and the Gryffindor house ghost, popularly known as Nearly-Headless Nick, are together found petrified. 

Classes are cancelled, and the school descends into a state of chaos.

* * *

As the Christmas break approaches, Harry takes to sneaking away from the prefect escorts and patrolling the school on his own. Not that this helps: whoever or whatever is petrifying the students doesn’t appear, even though Harry is on his own and seemingly vulnerable.

Hermione has taken to frantically studying in the library, trying to figure out what Slytherin’s monster is, and who might be controlling it. Most of the muggle-born students stay safely in their dormitory or common room, not daring to risk going outside. Almost all of them have signed up to go home for Christmas, terrified that they’ll be petrified next. Even though the teachers have assured everyone that the petrifications can be reversed, no one wants to be the next one attacked. The fact that a ghost was successfully petrified is what has everyone really unnerved: what could possibly harm the _dead?_

Harry signs his name on the list of students staying at Hogwarts over Christmas over the holidays, but encourages Ron to go home and see his family. Ron agrees to do so, despite his worry for his friends. Hermione, however, refuses, determined to unravel the mystery.

“At least promise me you won’t walk around alone,” Harry asks of her.

“Of course I won’t,” Hermione assures him. 

Harry walks her to the library every morning, and comes to get her at lunch time, before walking her back to the library after she’s eaten. When he isn’t escorting her, he spends his time searching the school, looking for the Heir, or Slytherin’s monster, or the fabled Chamber of Secrets.

He doesn’t find any of them.

* * *

Time passes, and although there haven’t been any more petrifications for a while, the teachers are still worried.

On the morning of February the 14th, Harry goes down to breakfast to find the Great Hall transformed. The walls are covered with large pink flowers, and heart-shaped confetti is falling from the ceiling. Harry is bemused, until Professor Lockhart stands up, beaming and wearing lurid pink robes, and wishes everyone a happy Valentine’s Day.

A group of surly-looking dwarves walk through the doorway into the Great Hall, and Harry struggles not to laugh. The burly, bearded dwarves are wearing golden wings and carrying golden harps; they are clearly supposed to resemble Cupid. The effect is not successful.

Professor Lockhart goes on to explain that the ‘cupids’ will be roaming the halls, delivering valentines to their recipients, and goes on to suggest that the students ask Professor Snape about love potions, or Professor Flitwick about entrancing enchantments.

Harry doesn’t see the professors’ reactions to that: he’s too busy pulling out a piece of parchment from his bag. 

“Harry, tell me you’re not going to send a valentine,” begs Ron, looking horrified. Hermione looks interested.

“It’s more of an apology than a valentine,” Harry says absently, putting quill to parchment and beginning to write. He writes in Basic, the language of galactic communication in the reality where Anakin lived and died. He knows that no one else will be able to read it – except for Padme.

He doesn’t know if she’ll read it, or if she’ll burn it the moment she realises who the sender is. But he has to try.

“Oh, Merlin, you’re sending that to my sister, aren’t you?” Ron moans. Harry ignores him.

‘ _Padme,_ ’ Harry writes, _‘I know that no apology in the galaxy will ever be enough, and that there is nothing I can do to atone for what I have done. But I beg you to read this, all the same...’_

He writes of how he still loves her, and misses her, and wishes that he had done things differently, when he was Anakin.

_ ‘I cannot blame you for spurning me – what I did was terrible, and there are no words sufficient to convey how deeply I regret my actions. I do not ask for your forgiveness: I know that I do not deserve it. But if you ever are in need of assistance, in any matter, know that I will gladly do anything you ask of me.’ _

Harry pauses, and contemplates what he’s written so far. His next words are not about him at all: instead, they’re about Luke, and Leia. Harry carefully describes them both, recounting Luke’s bravery and compassion, and Leia’s fierceness and conviction. He writes of the first time he ever saw Leia, speaking in the Imperial senate, every inch the diplomat her mother was; of Luke’s prowess as a Rebel pilot, flying rings around the Imperial pilots he went up against.

Finally, Harry finishes writing his letter, and folds it into thirds. He tracks down one of the dwarves, and asks that his letter be delivered to Ginny Weasley. The dwarf gives him a grouchy nod, and Harry goes off to attend his first class of the morning.

He doesn’t see Padme until lunch. When he glances her way, her eyes are red as though she’s been crying, and her expression is sombre.

Harry looks away, and ignores the ache in his heart.


	7. The Heir of Slytherin

** Chapter Seven **  
** The Heir of Slytherin **

For a while, the petrifications stop, and the school begins to relax, convinced that the danger is over. Harry doesn’t believe it, but he doesn’t say anything. He has no proof that the other students are wrong, after all – only the growing warning in the Force which Harry doesn’t know how to interpret. He only knows that _something_ is going to happen, and soon. But there’s not much he can do about it, until events actually come to pass.

Everyone is looking forward to the Gryffindor vs. Hufflepuff Quidditch match, and after seeing Hermione to the library, Harry allows Ron to drag him along to the match. The teams are on the pitch and the game is about to start when Professor McGonagall comes running onto the pitch, carrying a large megaphone, and announces that the match is cancelled. She directs all the students to head immediately to their common rooms, as quickly as possible, ignoring the Gryffindor team captain’s protests.

She turns, her eyes searching the stands... and her eyes land on Harry and Ron.

Harry knows, without being told, that something is very wrong. He hurries down from the stands, Ron shouting for him to wait up, and jogs across the pitch to Professor McGonagall.

“Something’s happened,” he says to Professor McGongall, while Ron lags behind him. 

Professor McGonagall looks down at him, her usual brisk expression gone, replaced with worry and sadness.

“Yes, Potter,” she says. “I think you should come with me... Weasley, too...”

“Please, Professor,” says Harry, his heart beating very fast. “Just – tell us.”

Professor McGonagall looks at him. Then, her voice unusually gentle, she says, “There has been another attack. Another _double_ attack.”

“Who is it?” Ron asks. 

“Hermione Granger and Penelope Clearwater,” Professor McGonagall says, and Harry feels a surge of protective, devastated fury.

“But she’s alright, isn’t she?” he manages to ask. “Besides being petrified, I mean.”

“We won’t know for certain until the antidote to her condition is brewed,” says Professor McGonagall. “But as far as we can tell, yes.”

Ron is white-faced. Harry is trying desperately to contain his anger. A little voice that sounds like Palpatine urges him to give into it, to let the power flow, to make the Heir of Slytherin regret what they have done...

Harry closes his eyes, and banishes the thought. He doesn’t need the Dark Side of the Force to make sure that the Heir of Slytherin regrets harming a hair on Hermione’s head.

“They were found near the library,” Professor McGonagall says, and Harry is jolted at the realisation that Hermione must have left the library, without waiting for him to come back for her after the match – but what could have made her so impatient that she would risk such a thing? 

“I don’t suppose either of you can explain this?” Professor McGonagall asks, and holds up a small, circular mirror, the kind that some of the girls habitually carry with them. To Harry’s knowledge, Hermione has never used one. 

Harry stares at it. The Force is telling him that something about the mirror is important.

“It was on the floor next to them,” Professor McGonagall adds, and he and Ron shake their heads, just as confused about the mirror’s presence as the professor.

Professor McGonagall sighs.

“Would you like to see her?” she asks, and Ron and Harry nod. “Very well – come with me...”  

They are escorted by the professor to the hospital wing, and Harry’s stomach lurches as he sees Hermione: utterly still, her eyes open and glassy.

Professor McGonagall gives Harry and Ron a moment of privacy. While Ron is staring, horrified and distraught, Harry circles the bed, back and forth, looking for some clue – he doesn’t even know what. But he knows there’s _something_.

It takes him a couple of minutes, but then he notices that there is something clenched in Hermione’s frozen fist.

“What are you doing?” Ron asks, as Harry bends over Hermione, trying to get a better look at what she’s holding. It’s a piece of paper, and Harry works it free from her unmoving grip.

Ron comes over to peer over Harry’s shoulder as Harry un-scrunches the piece of paper. It looks like a page torn from a library book. Harry reads it.

The page is all about the King of Serpents – the basilisk. It describes a gargantuan snake with a murderous stare, which instantly kills any living thing which meets its gaze. 

His hands shaking in realisation, Harry reads the rest of the page – the basilisk’s venom is just as deadly as its stare, and the crow of the rooster is fatal to it.

“It’s a basilisk,” he tells Ron. “The monster in the Chamber of Secrets is a basilisk.”

“Then why is everyone petrified, not dead?” Ron asks, having read over Harry’s shoulder.

“The hand mirror – Hermione and the Ravenclaw girl didn’t meet its gaze directly, they saw its reflection,” says Harry. “I’ll bet that no one else met its gaze directly, either – except perhaps Nearly-Headless Nick, but he was already dead.”

Harry waits until Professor McGonagall returns to escort them to back to their common room, and shows her the piece of paper, explaining what he’s deduced. By the end of his explanation, Professor McGonagall is white-faced and struggling to maintain her composure.

“A basilisk! It’s a wonder half the students aren’t dead,” she says, and then recalls that she has two students in front of her. She does her best to regain her usual calm. “Well done, Potter. I’ll take this news straight to the  headmaster.”

“It was Hermione who figured it out first, Professor,” Ron says, and Professor McGonagall nods.

“Regardless,” she says. “Twenty points to Gryffindor.”

Harry follows the professor and Ron back to Gryffindor Tower, his mind churning.

* * *

The full repercussions of the latest attack are not fully felt until the next morning. The news reaches the students that Dumbledore has been ousted from his position as headmaster. Classes are cancelled, and there’s a rumour that if the Heir of Slytherin isn’t found, the authorities are going to close the school.

Students are directed to stay within a group at all times, and to only go anywhere while escorted by a prefect or teacher, but as soon as breakfast is over, Harry slips away, into the depths of the castle.

It’s while he’s searching the school that Harry hears loud sobbing. He follows the sound to the nearest girls’ lavatory, and hesitates. But the sobbing continues, and so he enters the toilets.

“Hello? Are you okay?” he asks. There’s a hitch in the sobbing, and then a ghost peers through the nearest cubicle wall – literally. Harry startles at the sudden emergence of a face through the wood.

“What do you want?” the ghost says, pearly tears rolling down her translucent face.

“I heard crying, and I wanted to be sure no one was hurt,” Harry said cautiously. He isn’t exactly sure how to treat the ghosts; they look at him oddly, sometimes, as though they can sense something about him that at no one else can. “Are you all right?”

“Do I look all right?” the ghost demands, sniffling.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Harry asks.

Harry soon regrets asking this. The ghost launches into a recitation of every slight and bout of teasing she’d suffered when alive, before complaining about her existence now that she’s dead.

“And people call me _Moaning_ Myrtle,” she says indignantly, tears forgotten. “As though it isn’t bad enough being _dead_ , thank you very much!”

“How did you die?” asks Harry, out of a sense of morbid curiosity.

Myrtle’s entire demeanour changes.

“Ooh, it was dreadful,” she says, and recounts the story.

She’d been crying in the girl’s toilets – “In this very cubicle,” Myrtle says – when she’d heard a boy’s voice, speaking a language that sounded strange.  She’d opened the door, to tell the boy to leave... and there had been a pair of great yellow eyes, and...

“My whole body sort of seized up, and then I was floating away...” Myrtle looked at Harry expectantly.

“That’s... an impressive story,” Harry says, for lack of a better response. Myrtle beams at him.

The pair of ‘great yellow eyes’ sounds awfully like they could belong to a basilisk. But why would the Heir of Slytherin and their monster be in a girl’s loo? 

It’s almost time for lunch, so Harry makes his excuses to Myrtle, and leaves the girls’ toilets. Crowds of students are heading into the Great Hall, and so Harry joins the nearest group of Gryffindors. None of them notice him trailing behind them, and Harry heads for the Gryffindor table.

He’s sitting there, contemplating his next move, when Padme sits down beside him, and speaks to him for the first time in months.

“Anakin, I need your help,” she says. Her features are set with grim worry.

“Anything,” Harry says instantly, and means it with all of his heart.

“One of my friends – I think there’s something wrong. She hasn’t been acting like herself, and she hasn’t been seen since yesterday. I tried reporting this to one of her house prefects, but they didn’t seem to care, and I’m worried that something might have happened to her.”

Padme’s voice is calm and measured from long practice at maintaining her composure under stress, but Harry knows her well enough to perceive the extent of her concern.

“As soon as lunch is over, we’ll go find her,” he says simply, and sees Padme’s shoulders slump slightly in relief.

“Thank you,” she says, and Harry knows that he hasn’t been forgiven, but – to know that Padme trusts that he will be there when she needs him is a balm to his wounded soul.

On their way back to Gryffindor Tower, Harry pulls Padme into a storage cupboard, and they stand there and wait until the sound of other students passing by fades away. Only when everything is silent do they leave the cupboard, and begin searching for Padme’s friend.

“What’s your friend’s name?” Harry asks, as they walk.

“Luna,” Padme responds.

Harry feels the bottom drop out of his stomach.

“Luna Lovegood?”

“You know her?”

“She brought me sandwiches,” Harry says, and doesn’t mention the conversation that had passed between himself and Luna.

Padme smiles a little, despite her worry.

“That sounds like Luna. She’s a good person. She’s been my friend for almost as long as I can remember. Well. _This_ time around, anyway.” Padme is silent for a moment. “I hope she’s okay.”

“We’ll find her,” says Harry.

There’s silence for a while. There is no sign of Luna. Harry has a horrible hunch.

“Come on,” he says. “Let’s go this way.”

“Why? Where are we going?” Padme asks.

“Just... I want to check something,” Harry calls over his shoulder.

They emerge into the hallway where Mrs Norris was found. Harry stops so quickly that Padme walks into him.

Beneath the _‘enemies of the Heir beware’_ message is a new one. The paint is still wet. 

_ ‘Her skeleton will lie in the Chamber forever.’ _

Harry knows the moment Padme sees the message. He hears her suck in a breath.

“It... it might not be Luna,” Padme says. She doesn’t sound like she believes it. Harry doesn’t know what to say. He says nothing.

After a moment Padme turns to him, eyes flashing.

“What do you know?” she demands. Harry gives her a look of confusion, and she clarifies, “About the Heir of Slytherin. The monster. Anything useful.”

Harry tells her about discovering that the monster is a basilisk, and Padme pales.

“Do the teachers know?” she interrupts.

“I told Professor McGonagall, so presumably.”

“Go on,” Padme says, after a moment’s pacing, and Harry tells her about the ghost in the girls’ toilets.

“But what I don’t understand is, if it was the basilisk that killed her, what was it doing in the girls’ toilets?” 

Padme frowns, thinking.

“We need to go there,” she says, after a moment.

When they arrive, Myrtle is still in the girls’ lavatory. 

“Oh, you brought a _girl_ ,” she says to Harry, sounding discontented. “What are you doing here?”

“We’re looking for clues,” Padme replies absently, her gaze scanning the room.

“Clues to what?” Myrtle asks.

“What the Heir of Slytherin and their basilisk was doing in this lavatory, when you died,” Harry says, when it becomes clear that Padme is too abstracted to answer.

“Anakin – Harry – look at this,” Padme says suddenly. Harry walks over, and Padme points to a tiny carving of a snake under one of the basin taps.

“It can’t be coincidence,” says Harry. “Myrtle, where did you see the eyes?”

“Oh, around there, somewhere,” Myrtle says, waving a vague hand towards the row of basins.

Harry and Padme look at each other.

“There has to be an entrance to the Chamber of Secrets here somewhere,” says Padme. “But how do we find it?”

“The legend says that only the Heir of Slytherin can control the monster,” says Harry. “Maybe only they can enter the Chamber.”

“In that case, they probably use Parsletongue or something,” says Padme, looking back at the carving of the snake. 

“Parseltongue?”

“Snake language,” says Padme. “The ability to speak to snakes is an incredibly rare gift, passed down only in the Slytherin line.” 

She glances at Harry, but the look on his face makes her straighten up.

“Anakin? What is it?”

“Padme... I can speak to snakes...” he says slowly. For a long moment, they stare at each other.

“Please tell me you’re not the Heir of Slytherin,” Padme says, her voice shaking a little.

“I’m not the Heir of Slytherin,” Harry tells her. “Padme, I didn’t even know it was a Slytherin talent, until you just told me. I swear it.”

Padme takes a deep breath.

“Okay.”

She accepts Harry’s word for it, and Harry feels a burst of ill-timed pleasure at the fact that she believes him – even after everything.

“Try and say something in Parseltongue, then,” Padme suggests.

“I want to open the Chamber of Secrets.”

Nothing happens.

“You were speaking English,” Padme informs him.

“I thought I was speaking English every time I’ve spoken to a snake,” Harry tells her. “To me, speaking Parseltongue sounds exactly the same.”

Padme frowns.

“Try imagining a snake in front of you,” Padme says.

Harry does so.

“ _I want to open the Chamber of Secrets_ ,” he says – and on the word ‘ _open_ ’ the tap above the tiny snake carving glows, and begins to spin. The entire basin sinks out of sight, leaving a large pipe exposed. It’s big enough for a person to fit into. Possibly even a giant snake.

Harry and Padme exchange glances.

“Are we really doing this?” Harry asks, pulling out his wand.

“Whatever happened to the Hero With No Fear?” Padme asks, walking into the pipe without looking back at him.

“He learned reasonable caution!” Harry calls after her. He takes a step into the pipe, and there’s a yelp from somewhere in front of him which swiftly dies away. Harry doesn’t stop to think, gripped by sudden terror.

“Padme!” he yells, running forward – and the pipe abruptly slopes beneath his feet, and Harry tumbles down it.

It’s like going head-first down a slippery slide, if the slide is in perfect darkness, covered in damp slime, and where it ends is a mystery.

“ _Lumos!_ ” Harry says, and the pipe fills with brilliant white light, an instant before he shoots out the end of the slide and lands squarely on Padme.

There’s a confused moment, in which they both try to extricate themselves from the tangle of limbs.

“Anakin, get off me,” says Padme, her voice profoundly irritated. Harry manages to roll free, with enough momentum to roll to his feet. He offers Padme a hand up. After a moment of eying him, she takes it. He hauls her to her feet, and they both look around. 

In the light from Harry’s wand, they can make out a large, dark tunnel. The air is damp and stale.

“You should light up your wand, so that I can deal with any trouble,” Harry suggests.

Padme huffs.

“ _Lumos_. I’m not defenceless, Anakin,” she says, and lifts her wand to cast its light into the tunnel ahead.

“Padme, you’re eleven.”

“And you’re twelve,” she shoots back, walking into the tunnel, her expression wary.

“I’m also capable of using the Force,” Harry points out.

“Can we please not argue over this?” asks Padme. “I’m not going to leave Luna at the mercy of the Heir of Slytherin. You’re not changing my mind.”

“Just – be careful,” Harry says, worried that he might lose Padme a second time, and unable to articulate what losing her the first time had done to him.

Padme doesn’t answer, and the two of them walk along the tunnel. Part-way there, a shape looms out of the darkness, and Harry’s adrenalin spikes; but it’s not the basilisk. It’s a gigantic, shed skin, so large it takes up most of the tunnel.

“That’s enormous,” says Harry.

“It’s disgusting,” says Padme, and they keep going.

There’s a solid wall ahead, decorated with two large, carved serpents, their eyes glinting with two big emeralds.

Harry looks at Padme. She’s looking at the wall.

“Anakin. Open it.”

“ _Open_ ,” says Harry, picturing the grass snakes he used to talk to at the Dursleys, and the wall opens up.

He and Padme find themselves looking into a large chamber, filled with towering stone pillars with carved stone serpents twisted around them. They walk forward. At the far end of the long chamber is a colossal state of a wizened old wizard with a long thin beard, and between his feet –

“ _Luna!”_

With no one else in sight Padme starts running, and falls to her knees beside her friend, shaking her. “Luna, wake up! Please wake up!”

The Force twinges in warning, and Harry spins around, and sees the figure that steps from behind one of the tall pillars. It’s a tall, handsome boy of about sixteen or seventeen, wearing Slytherin robes – but the boy isn’t anyone Harry has seen around before, and he has a misty, insubstantial look around the edges, as though he isn’t quite real. 

The shocked look on the boy’s face at no longer being alone is only there for an instant, before it’s replaced by something calculating.

Harry moves to put himself in between the two girls and the newcomer, his wand raised.

“Who are you?” Harry asks, his voice steady, and behind him Padme gasps as she notices the boy.

The boy smiles pleasantly. He reminds Harry distinctly of Palpatine.

“You know, I think I should be asking you that. No one but a descendant of Slytherin can enter this chamber.” 

His eyes go to Harry’s forehead, and linger there, their gaze intent.

“Well, well, well,” the boy murmurs. “Harry _Potter_. The boy who lived to defeat _Voldemort_.” 

He doesn’t hesitate to say the name that most wizards refuse to speak, says it without an ounce of fear, some emotion in his voice which Harry can’t quite identify despite its familiarity.

“What did you do to Luna?” says Padme, her voice fierce, and the boy’s gaze flickers to her for a moment, before he looks back at Harry.

“It’s funny that it should be you, down here,” he says, ignoring Padme altogether. “That the two of us should meet at last, with everything that lies between us...”

“She asked you a question,” Harry says shortly, aiming his wand in the boy’s direction. “I suggest you answer it.”

A smirl curls the boy’s mouth.

“Very well,” he says. “It’s quite simple, really. Dear little Luna opened her heart and spilled all her secrets to an invisible stranger.” He says this with a distinct air of satisfaction.

“I haven’t seen you around,” says Harry, never taking his eyes off the boy.

“You wouldn’t have,” says the boy. “I was trapped, you see. Trapped in a diary for fifty years, with no way out. Do you know what it _does_ to you, Harry, to be trapped in a tiny dark space, and never be allowed out, ever?”

“I might,” says Harry grimly, thinking of the cupboard under the stairs.

“Then you understand my desperation,” says the boy, his voice smooth. “Fifty years without stimulus of any kind – and then dear little Luna found my diary, and began writing in it.”

The boy laughs, a cold, high laugh that is both unnerving and strangely familiar. Harry frowns, trying to place it.

“I became her new best friend. Luna wrote in my diary for months and months, telling me all her pitiful worries and woes: how the other boys and girls _tease_ her, taking her things and calling her ‘Loony’ Lovegood, how much she misses her father, and how she thinks she will _never_ get over witnessing her mother’s death...”

The boy grins.

“Luna poured out her heart and soul, into me, and that was exactly what I wanted. I grew stronger and stronger on a diet of her deepest fears, her darkest secrets. I grew powerful... powerful enough to start feeding little Miss Lovegood a few of _my_ secrets, to begin pouring a little of _my_ soul back into _her_...”

“You’re a monster,” says Padme, and there is no sympathy for him in her voice.

The boy laughs.

“A monster? That presupposes that good and evil are real and concrete things, rather than made-up concepts which the weak thought up to protect themselves from the strong. There is no good or evil – only power, and those who are too weak to seek it out...”

Harry’s eyes widen as he remembers the last person who gave him that speech. The hairs rise on the back of his neck.

“Who _are_ you?” he says, and the boy smiles at him.

“Can’t you guess, Harry? After all, we’ve met before... in my future... They say that I gave you that scar...”

“ _Voldemort?_ ” says Padme, and the boy looks at her.

“How very brave you are,” he says softly, “to dare say _my_ name...”

Padme looks back at him, and her gaze is burning with something that is not fear.

“To fear a name is foolishness of the highest order,” says Padme, and Harry is reminded, in this moment, of exactly why he loves her so much.

“To court _death_ is more foolish,” young Voldemort says, and he doesn’t look so pleased, now.

“You can’t be Voldemort,” says Harry, even though he knows that somehow, the boy before him _is_. “I met him, last year.”

“Is that so?” says young Voldemort, his voice strangely sibilant, his eyes glittering. “It is good to know that my elder self survives... but tell me, Harry... how did _you_ survive?”

Harry smiles, his expression devoid of warmth.

“As though I’d tell you.”

Young Voldemort looks furious for a moment, before reining it in, and smiling again.

“A pity,” he says. “Well. We will simply have to get it out of you the hard way. Have you ever faced down a basilisk before, Harry?”

Before Harry can answer, Riddle says, “ _Speak to me, Slytherin, greatest of the Hogwarts Four._ ”

There’s the sound of stone scraping against stone, and Harry whirls to see the giant statue’s mouth opening.

“Padme! Move!” Harry yells.

“Not without Luna!” she shouts back, and Harry, very much aware of their audience, raises his wand instead of using the Force and shouts, “ _Wingardium leviosa!_ ”

Luna is levitated into the air, her hair streaming down behind her, and Harry levitates her away from the statue’s feet. Padme scrambles after her, and just in time. Harry turns his back on the statue in a hurry as there’s the distant sound of giant scales rasping against stone.

“Anakin!” Padme yells, and there’s urgency in her voice.

“I know!” he yells back, trying to think of something.

“Face your death, Harry Potter,” young Voldemort calls, “at the hands of the greatest wizard in the world!”

“I’m pretty sure most people agree that the greatest wizard in the world is Albus Dumbledore,” Harry says, more because he wants to stall for time than because he believes it. “Everyone says so. Even at the height of your power, you didn’t dare try and take on Dumbledore. He still frightens you now, wherever you’re hiding these days.”

The smile vanishes from young Voldemort’s face.

“Dumbledore’s been driven out of this castle by the mere _memory_ of me!”

“He’s not as gone as you might think!” Harry retorts, still stalling.

“ _Anakin!_ ” Padme yells again, and Harry glances at her. She meets his eyes, before looking at young Voldemort, and back to Harry.

‘ _Distract him,’_ her gaze says.

Harry understands. He lowers Luna to the ground with his wand, and turns to face young Voldemort. At the same time, there’s a loud hissing, growing closer, interspersed with words.

“ _Rip... tear... kill...”_ says the basilisk, as it emerges into the Chamber.

But there is suddenly the sound of music, growing louder; spine-tingling, unearthly music which fills Harry’s heat with joy and sorrow in equal measure; and a crimson bird appears, circling the high ceiling twice before landing at Harry’s feet, a ragged bundle in its talons. The eerie music stops.

Harry and young Voldemort stare down at the bird, equally bemused.

“That’s a phoenix,” says young Voldemort, “and _that_ is the old school Sorting Hat.” He begins to laugh. “Is that all Dumbledore has sent you?”

The bird lets go of the Sorting Hat. Harry quickly scoops it up and puts it on.

_ ‘I could use a little help,’ _ he thinks, as loudly and clearly as he can. The next minute, something large and heavy thuds into his skull. 

Harry pulls off the Sorting Hat, and a gleaming silver sword falls out of it. Harry tucks his wand into his pocket, and picks up the sword in the same moment as the phoenix takes flight. Harry closes his eyes, takes on a fighting stance, and turns.

“ _Kill the boy!”_ young Voldemort orders, and the basilisk moves to obey. Harry stays where he is, every muscle tensed.

The basilisk is before him: Harry can hear it slithering across the floor in front of him. Harry’s hands are clumsy with the heavy sword, and although Harry’s _brain_ remembers what he’s doing, his _muscles_ aren’t as trained as they should be.

If he survives this, Harry vows to double his training and physical exercises.

There’s a hiss of anger and pain from the basilisk, and a burst of phoenix song.

“ _Ignore the bird!”_ young Voldemort screams. “ _Kill the boy!”_

Harry immerses himself in the Force, and waits. The sound of the basilisk grows closer, and closer... there’s a loud hiss, from directly in front of him...

_ There! _ Harry heeds the promptings of the Force and throws the sword, propelling it towards the snake with the Force. He dodges out of the way just in time, and the basilisk crashes to the floor, and Harry hears it thrashing before it goes still.

Harry risks a glance at his surroundings, and looks into great, bloody, ruined eyes, torn open by the phoenix, Harry presumes.

“Impressive,” hisses a cold voice, and Harry turns to look at young Voldemort. “Yes, to kill a thousand-year-old basilisk, at twelve, with nothing more than a sword... most impressive... but it makes no difference. In fact, I prefer it this way... Just you and me...” and young Voldemort begins to raise the wand he’s holding, which Harry suspects belongs to Luna.

“I don’t think so.” Padme is walking forward, moving into the shadow cast by the dead basilisk. She is holding a small black book in her hands – the diary young Voldemort mentioned, Harry realises belatedly.

Young Voldemort realises too.

“Give that to me,” he orders, pointing his stolen wand at Padme.

But Padme doesn’t respond, just keeps walking until she’s standing next to the basilisk’s head.

“I said _give it to me!_ ” Young Voldemort’s eyes have taken on a red tinge, and his face is fixed in a snarl.

“Never,” says Padme – and she takes the diary and impales it on the nearest basilisk fang.

The sound young Voldemort makes is long and terrible. As Harry watches, his gaze switching between Padme and young Voldemort, a torrent of ink gushes from the diary and down over Padme’s shoes, spreading across the floor, as young Voldemort screams and writhes and twists, until...

Silence falls, and Harry and Padme are the only ones left standing.

Padme looks at Harry. He shrugs, in a _‘well, that happened_ ,’ kind of way. Before Padme can respond, there is a quiet moan.

Both of them run to Luna, who is stirring from her spot on the damp stone floor some distance away, ink pooling at the edges of her robes and hair, dying it black.

Luna sits up before they quite reach her. Her eyes go to Padme, to Harry – to the enormous basilisk lying dead on the floor behind them.

“Ginny?” Luna says faintly, sounding distressed and confused.

“You’re safe, Luna, it’s alright, he’s gone,” Padme says, kneeling on the ink-covered floor and pulling Luna into a hug. “We destroyed the diary. He isn’t coming back. You’re safe.”

Luna clings to Padme, and Harry moves to stand beside them both.

“Luna,” Harry says, “where did you find the diary?”

Padme glares at him a little for the question, but otherwise doesn’t object.

Luna looks to Padme.

“I’m sorry,” she says, her voice trembling. “I saw it fall out of your transfiguration book. I picked it up, and I was going to give it back to you, but the pages had fallen open and it said T.M. Riddle inside, so I thought that it couldn’t be yours, after all...”

Padme is looking alarmed and confused, and it’s clear that she had no knowledge of the dairy tucked into her transfiguration textbook.

“And so you kept it,” says Harry, as gently as he can manage, but Luna looks up at him despairingly, all the same. 

“I was going to hand it in. I don’t know why I kept it. I didn’t mean to... I just... _did_.”

Padme looks at Harry over Luna’s shoulder.

“Compulsion charm?”

“Sounds like it.”

Padme looks back at Luna, her expression full of concern and compassion.

“Luna, it isn’t your fault.”

“But I should have known better,” Luna sobs, and begins to cry. “I told him everything he needed to know.”

“He came into your life in the guise of someone trustworthy and kind,” says Harry, who knows a thing or two about this. “He pretended to be your friend, and then, when it was too late to change course, you discovered that he was a monster.”

Harry can feel Padme’s eyes on him, but keeps his own fixed on Luna’s face.

“It’s not you who should feel ashamed, Luna. He took advantage of your trust and your good nature. _He_ is the one responsible for what happened, not you.”

Luna looks at him with big, tear-filled eyes.

“You promise you’re telling the truth?”

“I promise,” Harry says gravely. “I mean every word, Luna.”

“And if anyone asks, we’ll tell them all that it wasn’t your fault,” says Padme. 

“If anyone even thinks of trying to blame you, just tell us, and we’ll set them straight,” Harry adds.

Luna looks at Padme, then up at Harry. Finally she says, “You’re a good friend, Ginny. Harry Potter, can we be friends?”

“I would love to be friends with you, Luna,” Harry says, meaning every word.

Luna gives him a rather wobbly smile, but it’s a smile nonetheless.

She looks back at Padme.

“Did you really come here to save me?” she asks, and there’s vulnerability and yearning in her voice.

“Of _course_ ,” says Padme. “Luna, you’re my best friend. I couldn’t just leave you here.”

“I thought that maybe you liked your other friends better than me,” Luna confesses. “Tom said that he was sure you didn’t, but – he made it sound like he was saying it just to be kind.”

“Tom?” asks Padme.

“The diary,” says Luna, and wipes her face on her sleeve. “Tom Marvolo Riddle. That was his name.”

“Tom lied,” says Harry, with such authority that both girls look up at him, startled by his vehemence. “Rule one. Tom was a lying liar, and you can’t trust anything he told you. He was doing his best to manipulate you. I’m sure he was hoping that you’d distance yourself from Pa – Ginny so that she wouldn’t realise that something was wrong.”

“I thought he was my friend,” Luna says sadly, and Padme hugs her again.

Harry takes a deep breath, because he understands, far better than Padme, what it is to discover one of your most trusted people is a monster. He puts the thought aside. Now isn’t the time to think of himself and Palpatine.

“The diary... Luna, it contained a memory of a young Lord Voldemort.”

Luna’s eyes widen in horror.

“I was – _he_ was – I told _You-Know-Who_ all my secrets?!”

“Only a memory of him, and it’s gone,” Padme assures her. “You didn’t have to tell her that,” she tells Harry, her voice accusing.

“Yes, I did,” he says firmly. “The better she understands who ‘Tom’ really was, the easier it will be for her to reject whatever poisonous lies he’s been feeding her, all these months.”

“Lies are a prison all their own, which keep you under lock and key; but in the end, it is the truth which will set you free,” Luna murmurs.

“Exactly,” Harry tells her, gentling his voice again. “Now... why don’t we find our way out of here, before someone thinks the Heir of Slytherin has killed us all?”

Luna sniffles a bit, and Padme helps her to her feet.

“I’ll be back in a minute,” says Harry, and he goes up to the body of the dead basilisk and yanks out the sword embedded in the roof of its mouth, carefully avoiding the many protruding fangs. He pulls the diary off one such fang, and puts in into his robe pocket. He looks around for the Sorting Hat, finds it lying on the floor, and picks it up and tucks it under one arm.

There’s a burst of disquieting birdsong, and then a heavy weight on Harry’s shoulder as the phoenix lands there. It peers sideways at him with bright black eyes that are far too intelligent to belong to an ordinary bird, before letting out a musical chirrup.

Harry rejoins Padme and Luna, and together, they make their way out of the Chamber of Secrets, and into the long tunnel beyond.

When they get to the large pipe that leads to the girls’ toilets, the phoenix leaps off Harry’s shoulder and flutters in front of him, waving its long golden tail feathers.

“Does... does it want you to grab hold?” Padme asks, sounding confused.

Harry figures that if the magical bird wants him to do something, he might as well try it.

“Everyone grab onto me,” he says, and Padme and Luna cling to the arm holding the sword. With his free hand Harry grabs the phoenix’s tail feathers. They are strangely hot to the touch, and an odd sensation of lightness spreads through Harry from where his fingers are wrapped around the feathers, engulfing him. He hears Padme and Luna gasp as the feeling spreads to them, and the next moment, the three of them are lifted into the air by the phoenix.

Before Harry really has time to enjoy the experience, they’re back in the girl’s lavatory.

“You’re all still alive,” Myrtle says from her cubicle, looking astonished.

“We are,” says Harry. In spite of everything, he’s grinning, the relief of survival making itself felt. “Thanks for your help, Myrtle.”

The phoenix lands back on Harry’s shoulder.

“Where should we go now?” Harry asks Padme. He has no idea where the headmaster’s office is.

“Professor Flitwick’s office,” Luna surprises them both by saying. She seems to have calmed a great deal on the long walk back from the Chamber of Secrets, although her face is still red and puffy from crying and her fingers are tightly interlocked with Padme’s.

“He’s my head of house,” Luna adds, in explanation.

“I have no idea where his office is,” says Harry.

“I think it’s off the corridor with the charms classroom?” Padme offers, and the three of them head in that direction.

Sure enough, there’s a door saying _‘PROF._ _FILIUS FLITWICK, HEAD OF RAVENCLAW’_ on it. Harry opens it without even bothering to knock.

For a moment there is absolute silence as Professor Flitwick, Professor Dumbledore, and a man with Luna’s vague blue eyes stare at the trio in the doorway.

Then there’s a sob of pure, disbelieving joy from the blue eyed man, and he cries out, “ _Luna!_ ”

“Daddy!” Luna runs into his arms, and her father holds her close and cries into her ink-stained hair.

Professor Flitwick is staring in unadulterated amazement, while Professor Dumbledore is beaming at the scene.

“Bless my soul,” Professor Flitwick finally says, his voice faint as his eyes come to rest on the ruby-encrusted sword Harry is holding. “ _How...?”_

Harry and Padme look at each other. By unspoken agreement, it is Padme who steps forward and begins to explain, while Professor Flitwick ushers Luna and her father off to the hospital wing so that Luna can be checked over for injuries.

Partway through the story Padme is interrupted by the presence of Mr Malfoy, who seems utterly furious that Professor Dumbledore has returned to the school. But Professor Dumbledore smiles serenely, and makes polite threats, and Mr Malfoy pales slightly.

Trying to recover his poise, he demands to know if Professor Dumbledore has caught the culprit behind the attacks, yet, and if so, who is responsible.

“The same person as last time, Lucius. But this time, Lord Voldemort was acting through somebody else. By means of this diary.” 

Professor Dumbledore holds up young Voldemort’s diary, with the giant hole in the middle where it was speared on the basilisk fang.

Professor Dumbledore goes on, but Harry’s attention is on the house elf at Mr Malfoy’s heels. It’s Dobby – and he keeps making eye contact with Harry, pointing to Mr Malfoy, pointing to the diary, and then hitting himself on the head.

Suddenly, memory drifts back to Harry: of Mr Weasley and Mr Malfoy’s fight in the book shop before the school year began, and Mr Malfoy shoving Padme’s transfiguration book at her...

_ ‘I’m sorry, I saw it fall out of your transfiguration book...’ _ Luna had said, and Harry feels a gush of pure, murderous rage as he realises what had happened that all the objects in the office begin to rattle.

“ _You_ ,” says Harry, pointing the sword at Mr Malfoy. “ _You_ gave P – _Ginny_ the diary. At the beginning of the year. In the bookshop, when you had the fight with Mr Weasley. That’s why you approached him in the first place. You needed a reason to get close, to slip the diary into Ginny’s schoolbooks.”

Padme gasps, and her gaze turns to steel.

Mr Malfoy looks down at Harry contemptuously, but there’s a flicker of something uneasy in his eyes as he looks down at the sword.

“Prove it,” he says to Harry, and adds, “Put the sword down, boy, do you even know how to use it?”

Harry deliberately falls into a stance from one of the fighting styles he was taught as a Jedi.

“Want to find out?” he asks, and his smile is dark.

“Anakin, no,” says Padme, and Harry takes a step back, and lowers the sword so that the tip of it is no longer pointing at the easiest way to Mr Malfoy’s heart.

“No one will be able to prove anything, now that Riddle has vanished from the diary,” says Professor Dumbledore. “On the other hand, I would advise you, Lucius, not to go giving out any more of Lord Voldemort’s old school things. If any more of them find their way into innocent hands, I think Arthur Weasley, for one, will make sure they are traced back to you...”

As Mr Malfoy leaves, he kicks Dobby through the open door, and there is a loud squeal of pain.

Harry’s anger only increases, and he thinks quickly. Then he grins and an idea occurs to him.

Pulling off one shoe, he pulls off a sweaty, slime-covered sock, and turns to Professor Dumbledore.

“Can I have that diary back, Professor? I think it should go back to Mr Malfoy.”

“Certainly, Harry,” says Professor Dumbledore, and hands him the diary. Harry shoves the little black book into the disgusting sock, and takes off running while Padme is still staring at him in confusion.

He catches up with Mr Malfoy at the stairs.

“Mr Malfoy!” he calls. “I believe this is yours.”

He shoves the sock-covered diary into Mr Malfoy’s hands. The man makes a disgusted face, rips the sock off the diary and flings it aside, then glares murderously at Harry as he realises what the sock contained.

But Harry is looking at Dobby, and grinning, because the house elf is holding the sock with a look of dawning wonder and delight.

“Master has given Dobby a sock. Master gave it to Dobby.”

“What?” Mr Malfoy hasn’t quite realised what is going on.

“Dobby has a sock. Master threw it, and Dobby caught it, and Dobby – Dobby is _free_.”

Mr Malfoy looks from the house elf to Harry’s knowing grin. His face contorts, and he lunges at Harry.

Harry is already moving, but Dobby shouts, “You shall not harm Harry Potter!” and there is a loud _bang_ as Mr Malfoy is thrown backwards down the stairs. For a moment he lies still, but then he moves, staggering to his feet, his face livid with fury, and pulls out his wand.

“Say one syllable of a spell, and I _will_ act in self-defense,” Harry says, just loudly enough for his voice to carry down to Mr Malfoy, and something in his expression – his desperate wish, perhaps, that Mr Malfoy _will_ try something, giving Harry the excuse he needs to do him harm – gives Mr Malfoy pause. 

He stands there for a moment, looking up at Harry and the house-elf; then he turns and marches away, radiating anger.

“Harry Potter freed Dobby!” the house-elf says, and Harry grins at him.

“Enjoy your freedom, Dobby,” he says, and turns to return to Professor Flitwick’s office. 

“Dobby will, Harry Potter sir!”  the elf calls after him, and Harry hears him vanish with a loud _pop_.

* * *

By that evening, the entire school knows that Luna Lovegood was kidnapped by the Heir of Slytherin, and rescued by Harry Potter and Ginny Weasley.

“Why’d you take _Ginny_ with you?” Ron mutters enviously, but mostly, he’s too busy beaming at Hermione, who is no longer petrified.

When Harry last saw Luna, she was lying in a hospital bed, being treated for shock and the after-effects of dark magic, her father by her side, and looking happy to have him there. 

The man had thanked Harry and Padme profusely.

“My little flitterblossom,” he kept saying, “I don’t know what I’d do without her. But you saved her. I can’t thank you enough.”

Harry is glad that Luna is okay, and seems to be in the process of recovering from her ordeal already.

After dinner, he’s called up to the headmaster’s office, and assumes that it’s about what happened down in the Chamber of Secrets. He’s wrong.

“Molly Weasley tells me that you have expressed the wish to stay with her family over the school holidays,” Professor Dumbledore says, looking at Harry over steepled fingers.

Harry experiences a sinking feeling.

“That’s right, sir.”

Prfessor Dumbledore sighs.

“I am afraid, Harry that it is imperative that you return to your relatives, even if only for a few weeks.”

He proceeds to explain that there is a protection left to Harry by his dead mother’s sacrifice, a set of blood wards which must be renewed yearly, and which can only be renewed if Harry returns to the Dursleys, and calls their house home.

“I will let your relatives know to expect you,” Professor Dumbledore says into the silence, and his tone tells Harry that there is no arguing with him.

“Is that all?” Harry asks flatly. When Professor Dumbledore says that it is, and wishes him a pleasant summer, Harry doesn’t bother to respond, storming from the office.

He tells Ron and Hermione that he’ll be returning to the Dursleys for the summer, and both look worried.

That night, Harry is sitting in the common room when Padme comes up to him with her eyes full of fire, Hermione trailing behind her with an apprehensive expression, and asks, “Anakin, are your relatives abusing you?”

Several interested pairs of eyes look their way. Harry opens his mouth.

“And don’t lie to me,” Padme adds.

Harry closes his mouth, hesitates, and finally responds, “It’s nothing I don’t deserve.”

Padme’s expression shifts into appalled concern, although the fire is still there. 

“Anakin, you’re a _child_ ,” she says. “No matter what you might have done in the past, that doesn’t excuse your relatives. Do they even know?”

Harry knows she’s talking about his life as Anakin.

“No,” he admits.

“Then they have absolutely no excuse,” says Padme.

It’s Hermione who says hesitantly, “Perhaps we should take this discussion somewhere more private?”

Padme glances around at their curious audience, purses her lips, and says, “Let’s go somewhere we can speak in privacy.”

She looks back to make sure Harry is following, then sails out of the common room, ignoring the fact that it’s after curfew. Harry follows after her. Hermione trails behind them, still looking apprehensive.

Padme ducks behind a large tapestry into a hidden alcove, and demands, “Have you told anyone about the abuse?”

Harry doesn’t know how to respond. Padme’s face gentles at the look on his, and she puts a hand on his arm.

“You should have said something, to someone.”

As Hermione joins them, Harry looks at Padme’s hand on his arm, then back up at her face.

“What would be the point? Professor Dumbledore says that there are blood wards at the Dursleys which will protect me from dark wizards for a long as I consider their residence my home. Besides, we both know I deserve worse.”

Padme looks conflicted.

Hermione asks, “What do you mean, you deserve worse?”

Harry takes a deep breath, and tells her.

“In my last life, I was a Dark Lord. It was a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, but I did terrible things that I have no hope of making up for.”

“ _You_ , a Dark Lord?” Hermione’s voice is openly sceptical. “Harry, you’re the least Dark Lord-like person I’ve ever met.”

Padme clenches her fists and bites her lip, and doesn’t respond to Hermione’s well-meaning comment, turning her face away instead.

“You’d be surprised,” Harry says wearily. “I have a dark temper when something really gets to me, and I...” He hesitates. “I would do anything for those I love.”

Padme turns sharply at that.

“Except _listen to me_ ,” she says, in a fierce voice. “I _begged_ you not to go down that path, Anakin, but instead you–”

Her hand goes to her throat in memory, and she says no more. She doesn’t have to.

Hermione glances between them uneasily, from Harry’s tormented face to Padme’s anguished one, a thirteen year old girl exposed to a very adult discussion.

Harry feels wretched at the reminder of what he’s done.

“I know,” he says. “I was – I went mad, Padme. I have no excuse. I was out of my mind, and I didn’t – I couldn’t see the horror of what I was doing. Not until it was too late for me.”

“I didn’t want to believe Obi-Wan,” says Padme, her voice quiet. “I couldn’t. Not about this. Not _you_.”

“You two... knew each other in this past life, then?” Hermione breaks into their conversation.

Padme gives a bitter laugh.

“I was his _wife_ ,” she says, and Hermione’s eyes go huge as she looks between them.

Harry smiles mirthlessly.

“She hasn’t forgiven me for everything I have done.”

Padme whirls on him.

“You _tortured our daughter_!”

“I didn’t know! I swear I didn’t know she was our daughter. If I had, don’t you think I would have done things differently?”

“You shouldn’t have tortured _anyone!_ ”

Harry huffs out a breath, frustrated, because she’s right – but she doesn’t understand how completely his master controlled his life.

“I was completely dominated by Palpatine,” he says, flat-voiced. “He owned me, Padme, and you know I don’t use that word lightly.”

Padme just looks at him, her expression torn between revulsion and a desperate desire to understand.

“I lost myself, and I didn’t find myself again until the very end, when Palpatine was killing Luke.”

Padme’s eyes widen in alarm.

“What? Was he – what happened?” Her hands clench on the folds of her robes.

“I saved him,” says Harry, “I killed Palpatine, even though the injuries he dealt me were fatal. As I lay dying, Luke told me that he wished he could have saved me, and I told him –” Harry swallows hard. “I told him he already had.”

Silence falls between them. Hermione, despite her obvious curiosity, doesn’t quite dare break it.

“He’s a good man, our son,” Harry says, and he can hear the wistfulness in his own voice. “In the end, he brought me back to the light. He's brave, and kind, and compassionate – you would be proud of him.”

“I am.” Padme’s voice is quiet. “I wish I could have known him. And Leia.”

“I’ll tell you everything I know about them,” Harry promises.

Padme sighs, and shakes her head. Her expression when she looks at him is sad.

“Ani, where did it all go wrong?”

Harry can only shake his own head, because he’s asked himself this question so many times, and he always comes back to the same answer.

“Honestly? I think it all went wrong the moment Obi-Wan took me on as his padawan. The Jedi way of life – I couldn’t live up to it, and in the end, my failure left me perfectly vulnerable to Palpatine’s manipulations.”

“I can’t believe that,” Padme says firmly. “You were a good man, and a good Jedi.” She uses the past tense. _Were_.

“Was I?” Harry’s mouth twists wryly. “Padme, marrying you was the best thing I ever did, but as a Jedi, it was unthinkable. In retrospect, it should have been a sign that I was better off leaving the Order. Maybe, if I had, Palpatine wouldn’t have been able to get his hooks in me as deeply as he did.”

Padme looks at him, her expression lost.

Hermione clears her throat.

“I’m sorry to interrupt, but weren’t we here to talk about Harry’s living situation?” 

“You’re right.” Padme lets out a huff of air. “We’ve gotten completely side-tracked.”

Harry makes a face.

“Padme, you can’t have it both ways. Either I’m a monster who deserved everything I get, or I’m an innocent child who doesn’t.”

Padme looks exasperated.

“That’s an oversimplification, and you know it. Whatever you did in your past life, no one else knows about it. This is a chance for you to start over and do something _good_. There is a difference between being punished according to the laws and procedures of a just and fair judicial system, and being abused by the people who are supposed to care for you because you’re powerless to stop them.”

“I’m not powerless,” Harry points out, and Padme shoots him a glare.

“Choosing not to resort to violence and intimidation tactics in this case equals the same thing. Your relatives are terrible people, and they should be stopped.”

Harry has always seen the Dursleys’ as the universe’s instrument of punishment for everything Anakin has done. Trying to consider them as child abusers instead is difficult.

Harry abandons the attempt.

“It doesn’t matter,” he says. “Professor Dumbledore says I have to stay with them for my own protection.”

He watches Padme’s nostrils flare.

“Anakin, if I have to, I will talk to Professor Dumbledore myself,” she says, every inch the queen she used to be. “Either those people drastically change their behaviour, or you don’t go back to them. Whatever happens, you need to stop accepting what they do to you as _right_.”

“She’s right, Harry,” says Hermione.

Seeing Padme so concerned for his wellbeing makes Harry feel warm inside. He can’t help but smile, even though he knows it’s going to get him into trouble.

“What?” Padme demands. “Why are you smiling?”

“I missed you so much,” Harry tells her.

“Don’t push it,” Padme says, but there’s no anger in her voice now, and for the first time, Harry thinks that maybe, with time, she might forgive him.

All he says, though, is: “Well, if you do decide to confront Professor Dumbledore, I don’t want to miss the show,” and steps away from Padme’s swipe at his arm.

“Tell me what those people have done to you,” she says, not amused at all.

Harry’s smile fades.

“Are you sure you want to know?”

“I am,” she says.

Harry doesn’t tell her everything. But he gives her the broad picture without going too much into details.

“We’ll stop them,” Padme says, when he’s done. “If I have to get my brothers to go down there and curse them, we’ll stop them, Harry.” 

Harry looks from Hermione’s distraught face, to Padme’s grimly determined one, and he believes her.

* * *

The next day, when Professor Dumbledore is presiding over the Leaving Feast, Padme goes right up to the head table, all on her own. She moves with queenly grace and dignity, and half the school stops their chatter to see what the first-year who helped defeat the Heir of Sytherin wants with the headmaster. 

“Professor Dumbledore,” she says, her voice polite, but firm enough that she can’t be ignored. “Is it true that Harry has to go back to his relatives over the holidays?”

Professor Dumbledore looks at her curiously over the top of his spectacles.

“I am afraid so, Miss Weasley.”

“Then I hope that you intend to protect him from further harm from his relatives,” says Padme in a clear, carrying voice that reaches half the Great Hall.

Harry watches her in admiration as a murmur begins among the students.

“Miss Weasley, Professor Dumbledore is not accountable to you for–” Professor McGonagall begins, but Professor Dumbledore raises his hand, and she falls silent.

He meets Padme’s eyes.

“What harm, Miss Weasley?”

“Starvation,” says Padme. “Physical violence. Being forced to sleep in a storage cupboard under some stairs until he was eleven. I’m sure there’s much more, but that was what I was able to drag out of Harry.”

“Preposterous,” says Professor Snape, with a sneer. “The boy is clearly making up stories.”

“Quiet, Severus,” says Professor Dumbledore, without taking his eyes off Padme. His eyes have gone winter-cold. “Mr Potter, would you come up to the head table, please?”

Harry stands up, indifferent to the stares and murmurs, and walks up to the head table where Professor Dumbledore sits.

“Harry,” says the headmaster. “Is Miss Weasley’s claim that you are mistreated by your relatives true?”

Harry shrugs his shoulders, aware that his schoolmates might spread this news all over Britain. He doesn’t care.

“There’s a reason why I escaped to the Weasleys’ last summer, Professor.”

Professor Dumbledore’s eyes grow even colder.

“I see. In that case, I think it would be best if I paid your relatives a visit over the holidays.”

Professor Dumbledore speaks calmly, but Harry can feel the headmaster’s anger. 

“I look forward to it, sir.”

Professor Dumbledore looks at Harry over the top of his spectacles.

“Is there a reason why you did not inform me of this yourself, Harry?”

Harry shifts, feeling discomfort for the first time since this conversation began.

“He believes that he deserves it,” says Padme, quietly: too quietly for anyone but the teachers to hear.

Harry’s expression doesn’t change. Professor Dumbledore looks tired.

“I see. You may both return to the Gryffindor table. I assure you, I will address the situation.”

Padme nods, and turns. Harry follows her back to their seats at the Gryffindor table.

The other students seem uncomfortable for a while, unsure of how to react to the revelation that their hero is mistreated by his guardians, but Harry ignores them.

After the leaving feast, the students gather their belongings and begin to board the Express back to London.

Before Harry can get on the train, Padme pulls him aside, and takes a deep breath.

“I can never forgive you for hurting our babies,” she says, and Harry waits, and listens. “What you did was terrible, and I don’t even know what other terrible things you did. How long? How long did you stay by Palpatine’s side?”

“Twenty-two years,” Harry says, and sees her swallow.

“How many heinous things did you do, because he told you to?”

Harry doesn’t answer. The truth is, he’s long lost count.

Padme shakes her head, her expression full of grief and sadness.

“I realised,” she says slowly, “that I can never forgive my husband for the things he chose to do. But you’re not just my husband anymore, are you – _Harry_?”

Harry says nothing.

“You’re not Anakin Skywalker, anymore than I’m Padme Amidala Naberrie. You’re a twelve year old boy with terrible memories, and that’s all. I don’t know you. There are some things you have in common with Anakin, but I’m sure that there are many other things you don’t. And I’m starting to see that.”

Harry doesn’t say anything. He feels as though he might cry.

“What happened, happened a long time ago,” says Padme. “To two people who are dead. We both need to let it go, or we will never be happy.”

She takes a deep breath.

“What I’m saying is, I can never forgive Anakin. But I might be interested in getting to know Harry Potter.”

For a long moment Harry looks at her. This – this is more grace than he ever expected. Tears sting his eyelids, and he knows she’s right. They both need to let go of the past, or it will consume them, all over again.

Maybe, he thinks, it would have been kinder if they’d never regained their memories – but had instead met each other for the first time in this life without remembering, feeling drawn to one another without ever understanding exactly why.

Padme – _Ginny_ smiles a little, and holds out her hand to shake. 

“I’m Ginny Weasley,” she says, and waits for him to respond.

He shakes her hand, and says, “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Ginny Weasley. I’m Harry Potter.”

It feels like a new beginning, and Harry swears to himself that this time, he won’t waste it.  
 


End file.
